Sarasota High students build competitive robotics team

To the untrained eye, last month’s national FIRST Robotics Championship might have looked like a scene from the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Teams of robots maneuvered miniature arenas, shooting basketballs and balancing on beams, all vying for victory in a packed football stadium.

Among the competitors for the first time was the Sarasota Jungle Robotics team, which includes 27 students from Pine View, Suncoast Polytechnical and Riverview high schools. The national tournament, held in St. Louis, was the culmination of months of building and competing for the Sarasota team, which, in its second year, has already earned a solid reputation in the robotics world.

Each January, FIRST, the national organization designed to inspire students in the fields of engineering and technology, reveals the task for the competition. Teams then have six weeks to use the provided materials to build their robot and compete in regional competitions.

This year’s task required the robots to shoot foam basketballs into a hoop and balance on a balance beam. The Jungle Robotics team set out to build a robot that was a utility player, putting equal focus on both aspects of the task.

Team captain and Pine View senior Vincent Franke says the team’s huge, come-from-behind victory at the regional competition in Orlando came as a pleasant surprise. After a series of unfortunate team pairings, the team was ranked 40 out of 42 teams, but in an unexpected turn of events, the No. 1 seeded team picked Jungle Robotics as a partner, and the team was able to qualify for nationals.

“They picked us, because we could balance,” Franke says.

In only its second year, the team found itself at the national tournament, where about 400 teams would compete in the Edwards Jones Dome. Team coach and mentor Chap Percival says the team proved a strong competitor until it fell victim to technical malfunctions and ended up placing 78 out of 100 in its division.

Team founder Nathan Helgesen is happy the team is off to a solid start.

“The best part about robotics is the atmosphere,” Helgesen says. “At nationals, there are thousands of other kids who have put in the same amount of work as you, and everyone is just working together to have fun.”