Week 6&7 newsletter 2026

Written by Sophia Thieringer, Jaisri Velmurugan

General News

What has happened at Chicken Bot Pie recently? The short and easy answer: a lot! This week’s newsletter will go in depth of what each subteam has completed up to and at the Lake Superior Regional. Our team ended up as a 3rd pick on Alliance 3, and our Alliance got 3rd place!

Programming

Days leading up to competition, programming is finalizing many aspects to their coding of the robot. With the almost completed robot able to be tested, programming’s auto code is able to be tested and tuned to be performing to the best of its ability. Additionally, LED lights were being programmed, however did not make it onto the robot in time for competition.

In Duluth, there were continuous fixes on the auto code. For example, our robot was accelerating too quickly during auto, so programmers altered this to function better for our robot. Overall, shooting was a bit off, both during auto and teleop. This is something that programmers hope to improve. On a good note, the April tags were being successfully scanned by the camera. Something that didn’t go too well was the accidental use of 2.4 gigahertz by the Radio, causing severe glitching with the cameras as well as storage running out on the network tables.

Build & Design

With numerous scares and frights, the suspense with build and design never truly ends. We’ve implemented several final additions and adjustments leading up to the Lake Superior Regionals, including a complete redesign and rebuild of our intake system. Additionally, we’ve been fine-tuning every component, with a focus on the extendable hopper, turret, and intake.

While at Lake Superior, we discovered the extendable hopper was not functioning correctly due to a combination of errors in material printing quality and a few nuts bolted too tight.

To fix this, the pit crew re-drilled the holes and used rivets to properly secure the hopper. The turret also presented a challenge, having unintentionally disassembled itself twice. This was quite frustrating, leading up to us becoming what we called a “defense bot”: a bot that is used for nothing but defense. This actually was quite successful considering our circumstances. Finally, we addressed a major issue with the bumpers falling off by using zip ties to ensure they stay firmly in place during competition. 

Operations

Operations has been hard at work organizing a Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) outreach event for numerous robotics teams across Minnesota. This will serve to boost inter-team interaction and strengthen the sense of community within the high school STEM community. In addition to event planning operations also has printed out sponsorship stickers and put them onto the robot. This way we can proudly display our sponsors and earn them some recognition. Our Menstrual Equity Ambassador initiative has also been a significant focus; there has been diligent work done to ensure our designated bathrooms were fully stocked with menstrual products. At Lake Superior, many posts were created and sent out to inform everyone about what is happening up in Duluth!. Finally, a special shout-out to Connor and Aishah for their impressive impact speech! All of the accomplishments that operations has achieved this season has led our team up to the winning of the Judges’ Award, which we were given at Lake Superior.

Strategy

Pre-scouting other teams’ Week 0’s are a great opportunity for strategy to get a better idea of how teams are performing and how they will perform at Lake Superior. Reviewing the performance of other teams allows us to better plan to score as many points as possible. In order to use this knowledge effectively, the strategy subteam communicates with our Drive Coach, Manuel, to ensure he is up to date on all the important strategies to use and encourage our driver, Curtis, and our operator, Kendrick, during matches.

At the competition, lots of scouting was completed. Scouting allows for the strategy subteam to look back at competition to recall key aspects of robots that may have scored well and ones that did not. Whether it is stand scouting, which is observing and keeping track of scoring during matches, or pit scouting, which is going to other teams’ pits and asking them specific details about their robot, scouting is super helpful in the long term. It is almost important to note the strategy subteam’s determination to maintain the drive team updated with their latest knowledge, ensuring our team is well prepared on the field.

The Lake Superior Regional was full of learning curves, but was also full of successes. We are very proud of our accomplishments we have made these past few weeks to get our team to the position it carries. We hope to see you at our next competition: 10k Lakes!

Thank you!!