By J.D. O’Gara

The 23 young members of the 4H ALARM FRC Robotics Team 2079, who meet regularly at Franklin’s Red Brick Schoolhouse, had a momentous year building their 120 lb. robot, “Hydra,” and entering it into several First Robotics Competitions this year. This group certainly earns their name, an acronym for “A Lot of Awesome Robot Makers.” Participating in First Robotics Competitions (FRC) run by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), the team of students from 8th to 12th grade from 11 local towns, first became second place finalist and winner of the Team Spirit Award at the New England District BSU Event 2024, and later won the prestigious Engineering Inspiration Award at both the New England District Championship in West Springfield and WPI. The latter earned them a spot at the World Championship at Houston, Texas.

Local Town Pages met with some members of the 4H ALARM FRC Robotics Team 2079, learning about the process of building the robot and taking it to competition. after a game kick-off in January, the students and mentors worked for over 9 weeks, sometimes putting in over 20-30 hours every week to design, build and program Hydra for the specific tasks of the challenge.

“Basically, we CAD the whole robot, and then we send it to our sponsor, Bauer, and they laser cut all the plates. All the metal that’s not plates, we get from onlinemetals.com and cut them to size to fit our design,” said Ishan Kasam.

Team members originally split off into subgroups to come up with various robot designs, later merging ideas into one CAD design.

“The faster we can do the CAD, the faster we can get the plates sent to Bauer,” added teammate Siddharth Prabhu. “Once we have a very detailed CAD model … we can look at the CAD and know exactly where it goes on the robot.” 

After the design was complete, various members of the team worked on multiple parts of the robot simultaneously.

The young engineers explain some of the challenges they faced and how they dealt with them, improving the robot after each competition.

“It was a learning process,” said Prabhu, “(at one point) we had to glue all the screws in, because they kept falling out due to hard hits. Later, our drive train fell apart. Each competition elicited improvements to the model.”

Programmers also played an essential role. Using JAVA, the programmers had about a week before the competition to work with the robot once it was built. “A lot of the things we program are driver assistances that help the driver drive the robot better or smarter,” adds Vansh Mookim. For example, since the robot had to pick up a circular “note”, a program was created to help the robot better align to it. 

Team mentor Erica Payne, an electrical engineer who also mentors Girls Who Code, believes the robotics team is getting a leg up in the professional world. “This is real engineering … (the kids) are learning mechanical engineering skills with the CAD, they’re learning electrical engineering skills with the wiring, they’re learning computer engineering skills with the software programming, they’re learning manufacturing engineering skills, because they have to understand that you don’t just invent it and it magically appears, they have to understand schedule and production, they’re learning project management, because we’re a whole team, and they have to understand that you have to one piece done before another piece can be done, and communication skills…”

At the World competition, Hydra was operated a “drivers,” who make a game play. The Franklin team was randomly paired with two other teams for a 3:3 match.

Although going to the World Championship required a lot of coordination, the experience in Houston inspired a sense of belonging to the team. 

“We were worried how we’d stack up. We almost thought the kids would be disappointed with the amount of stiff competition, but we were pleasantly surprised when the final matches began,” says mentor Pallavi Naravane, an electronic engineer who teaches programming and robotics.

“You could be talking to someone outside (who speaks) a different language, but you (both) know the language of robotics. There’s a community there that understands you,” noted teammate Ishika Kumar.

Winning First Robotics’ Engineering Inspiration Award this year speaks to 4H ALARM Robotics’ commitment to inspiring younger children to appreciate engineering. The award “celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school or organization and community.”

In fact, the 4H ALARM Robotics Team has taken younger members of the community under its wing, with a host of outreach events geared toward teaching younger kids. The team held a TinkerCAD workshop at the Franklin Public Library, in which they taught younger children CAD basics, The high schoolers also held a five-hour Scratch Hackathon in October for elementary and middle school kids, and they created and coached two elementary-aged FLL Explore teams, bringing those teams to First Robotics competitions. 

The mentoring opportunities instilled a sense of leadership. “One thing I learned is you have to be really patient, and you should not confront someone who is a little shy,” says Mookim, “You should slowly learn and engage, and then they won’t be shy anymore.”

Other mentors of the team this year include Ajit Naravane, Arnold Kalmbach, Steve Dunbar, Erica Schveighoffer, Steven Schveighoffer, James Minihane, Nick Mosher, and Jon Miller. 

4H ALARM Robotics is supported by generous sponsors- Dassault Systemes, Pratt & Whitney, TE Connectivity, Gene Haas Foundation, General Dynamics-Mission Systems, Mathworks, Natural Resources Management, Tib Family and partners 4H and the Franklin Public Library. 

Hydra has a little life left in it, still, before it’s taken apart and salvaged for next year’s robot. The team will take it to the “Mayhem in Merrimack” competition at Merrimack High School on September 14th and later to the New England Robotics Derby (NERD) on October 12th.

Those interested in connecting with 4H ALARM Robotics can find them at www.alarmrobotics.com, on Facebook (AlarmRobotics2079), on X @4-H Alarm Robotics and on Instagram at 4h_alarm_robotics.