Two campuses, two teams, gears, bolts, coding, metal and late nights. That’s just a few parts of what it takes for our Royals to prepare for the upcoming FIRST Robotics Competition. Servite’s Friarbots will be participating at the FRC Orange County regional while Rosary’s Rebel Robotics will be participating at the LA Regional competition.
The Royal Rebel Robotics will be participating in the FIRST Robotics Competition from March 14 to 16 in the LA Regional competition at the DaVinci Schools in El Segundo. Team captain Marissa Valencia ‘25 explains a little more about the competition itself, “The name of this year’s challenge is Reefscape, and it is the long-awaited water game. While we are not making boats, the theme is based on the coral reefs and all that is in the ocean.”
The challenges involve having the robot remove “algae” (a foam ball) from the “coral reef” (which is a metal cage) and at the end of the competition the robot will be required to hang on the cage by its mechanical arm.
The Rosary team started with a “kit” (partially premade) robot and customized it from there. Valencia adds, “We mainly strategized how and when we wanted to get the robot done, and since then we’ve been chipping away at the kitbot we received. We have had different groups of people doing different things, some building the robot, some learning the coding, some on the wiring, but we all work together on the main robot from time to time. YouTube and the FIRST website have become our best friends this season.”
Team member Jenna DeLaRiva ’26 looks forward to the competition, saying, “I am excited because I remember last year it was such a cool competition, and I love the energy of the robotics community!”
On Servite’s campus, seniors Marissa Perez and Jesslyn Adobo are also preparing for the competition with the Servite Friarbots. They will compete this weekend, February 28 to March 2, at the Orange County Fair Grounds for the district competition. The competition is also the Reefscape theme and the Friarbots will face the same challenges as Rosary’s team.
Leading up to the competition, Marissa helped build Friarbots’ robot from the ground up, helping with prototyping and constructing the parts for the bot. “This robot was designed by the collaboration of all of our members through a lot of prototyping and looking back at previous years’ designs for inspiration. Jeslynn and a few other students used CAD (computer-aided design) to make the design on the computer and figure out the sizing and spacing of all of the parts. I fabricated most of the aluminum parts myself and we spent this last week or so putting it all together. A lot of extra time was put in by a few of our members that really helped the robot get ready for this competition.”
Jess also played a crucial role in getting their robot created, she made the robot’s blueprint in CAD, which is a digital platform that makes 3D models of the robot.
Additionally, this weekend Marissa will play a crucial role in the team’s success, “My role this weekend is to be the lead scouter which means I have to organize all of the scouters to properly watch and take certain data from each robot per match. I also watch the matches myself to look for particular strategies, problems, good ideas, etc., so anything a regular scouter would miss. After the first night of competition, we hold a scouting meeting where I have to help facilitate conversation and influence our alliance selection list (the ordered list of the teams we would pick if we become a captain to join us in playoffs the next day).”
We wish the Friarbots and Royal Rebels the best of luck at their competition.
