ATEMS senior Javier Butz was sure his VEX Robotics team made the World Championship competition before the Region V competition at The LIFT ended on Saturday, Feb. 24. His teammate, senior Logan Daniel, wasn’t so sure. And their teacher and coach, Larry Haney, wasn’t saying anything.
However, four days after the competition ended – on Wednesday, Feb. 28 – Vex Robotics Team 9871T learned it had earned a spot in the VEX World Championship competition, April 28-30, at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in Dallas.
Region V might be the most competitive region in the state, proven by robot 2029C from the AI & Robotics Academy, LLC, in Plano, which produced a skills score of 427. That score was the highest in the world and was later tied by a team from Shanghai, China, which will also be competing at the world championships.
The AI & Robotics machine won several categories, qualifying for the world championship in each event. But a robot can only qualify in one event, so those double-qualifiers are replaced with the next-highest scores. The ATEMS team scored 297 points in the skills competition, enough to earn a spot at next month’s world championship competition.
“I was looking at the skills rankings and points throughout the day and doing the math, and I thought we had a good shot to get one of those double-qualifier slots,” Butz said. “But Mr. Haney kept it from us and wouldn’t let us in on it, so we had to wait a few days to find out for sure.”
Butz and Daniel credited two specific areas for their team and robot getting to the world championships.
“What got us to the world championship meet was our driver,” Butz said. “Our driver, Jose Rico, came up huge for us. He was amazing all day and recorded the highest skills score he’s ever gotten.”
While also crediting Rico, Daniel said another aspect helped get the team to Dallas.
“The entire robotics team at ATEMS helped us with our coding to make it as good as possible,” Daniel said. “That was a big key for us. And JJ (Rico) was impressive. You have to keep a cool head and look for other options when driving the robot, and he did both of those things all day. During the match, several people are advising the driver, and they have to make decisions in the heat of the moment. He kept his cool and made all the right decisions.”
And now comes the hard part: getting the robot ready for the world championships. And Butz – having been there as a freshman and the only person in Abilene ISD to reach the robotics world championship meet twice – knows what must be done: a total rebuild of the robot.
“We have to,” he said. “We were completely out-classed in this tournament, so we must change everything. Our catapult was slow. Our base drive was finicky. And our lift was crazy. We must completely reconfigure the entire robot, just like we did four years ago.”
Back in 2020-21, when Butz was a freshman, the team rebuilt the robot from the ground up, making it lighter and giving it a better and stronger catapult. Similar changes are in store for this year’s robot. So, the machine that earned a spot in the world championship competition and took around five months to build has been scrapped, and a new robot will make its way to Dallas next month.
“We’re already halfway done,” Butz said. “I’ve got the plan for the new one laid out, and we’ve started getting it coded and built. We will make it lighter with a fully aluminum body like we did four years ago. It will be a lot of work, but we’ll get there. We know exactly what and how to build what we need.”
And that rebuild doesn’t scare Daniel.
“We’ve done it before,” he said. “There were days I would walk into the robotics lab to see Javier building or changing or adding new parts to the old robot. We would have a new catapult or loading system because he would continue building day after day. But now we know what works and where to put our focus.”
