South Eugene Robotics Team (SERT) ends another successful season competing at worlds 2024.

The South Eugene Robotics Team 2521 (SERT) has wrapped up another successful season of the FIRST robotics competition. Even from the season’s early events, SERT’s robot, “Marvin” was a competitive force at competition.

“We won both of our two regional events and we were finalists at our district championship,” SERT co-captain Callaway Macovis explained, “so we are second ranked overall in the Pacific Northwest West and first in Oregon, and we qualified for the world championships in Houston, so we’re one of the top 600 teams in the world.”

 George Murchison, CAD (Computer Aided Design) subteam leader, attributed the success of their robot to several factors.

“I think a combination of hard work,” Murchison said, “commitment from the students, both in season and preparing for the season, support from the mentors, as well, and just strong planning and analyzing what we need to make happen, how we can continue to improve and then a lot of drive from everybody and willingness to learn and to grow.”

The competition season started back in January, when the organization that hosts the robotics competition, FIRST, released the 2024 game “Crescendo.” After the game’s release, teams raced to design a robot before competitions started in early March. 

“The first thing we do,” Macovis explained, “is we all get together in one room as soon as the game is released, because we have a different game every year, and we all brainstorm that for about six hours.

“From there, we take those ideas – every idea that’s put out there – we vote on two or three that we want to pursue. From there we go to prototyping, so we’ll make rough mock-ups of each idea out of wood and spare bearings and test each of those prototypes on the actual game pieces we receive shortly after the game is released, and after the prototypes are done, have been tested we then vote on which of those specifically to pursue.”

To create the robot itself, the robotics team divides up the work between members with specialized skill sets.

“There’s different subteams, like mechanical, which goes and builds the robot, CAD, which will make a 3D plan out of the robot and make the decisions of what the robot will look like, electrical, which does all the wiring on the robot,” software co-lead Benji Urbancic said, also explaining SERT’s business team, for community outreach, and media team, which documents events.

SERT has done very well this year at competition, and behind the scenes are the members that have worked hard in order to make that happen.

“We have a very experienced whole group of members and they’ve been very willing and able to teach our more junior members which has been wonderful to see,” Macovis said, “So I’d say that most of our success can be chalked up to, as corny as it sounds, teamwork. I mean, none of us can build a robot on our own.” 

The robotics team’s success at district events and the Pacific Northwest Regional  championship has qualified them to attend the FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas. SERT will have participated in this event by the time this article is published.

UPDATE: SERT reached rank 8 in the Curie Division at the championship before being knocked out in the division semifinals. They ended the season at rank 67 worldwide.

By Julian White