Events

Congratulations Mahlon and Varuna for taking Silver in the middle school division of the SkillsUSA NLSC Urban Search & Rescue Robotics National Championship in Atlanta! This was a tremendous accomplishment and especially incredible since this is the first time we've competed at the national level in robotics. Great job guys! Click here to read more.

During the Alberton Public School Exhibition there was a special robotics expo. Two students qualified for SkillsUSA Nationals in Atlanta, GA June 23rd-28th. We told about their journey and promoted ways to support them as they fundraise for their trip. There was also a demo of multiple SkillsUSA and FIRST Tech Challenge robots and audience members got to try their hand driving the robots! 

We fielded two high school teams and one middle school team for the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Robotics Competition a Montana SkillsUSA SLSC in Great Falls, MT - April 3-6, 2025. Congratulations Mahlon & Varuna for taking Gold in the middle school division, and congratulations David and Evan for taking Bronze in the high school division!

Alberton helped run an FTC scrimmage at Sentinel High School in Missoula at the Missoula Robotics Team FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff event.

Both teams competed at the FIRST Tech Challenge Montana state championship tournament, placing 22nd for HS and 17th for MS. The high school team reworked its scoring arms and claws to much more reliable and fast central servo-based arms with preset locations that allowed for rapid scoring cycles. Our Roadrunner based autonomous allowed the robot to place multiple specimens on the high chamber, however loose screws caused the vertical slide to move inconsistently, repeatedly causing issues during both autonomous and teleop. The middle school team performed much more consistently, but lost some matches by narrow margins. The high school team got 2nd place for the Innovate Award, and the middle school team got 2nd place for the Control Award.

We split our team into two: the high school Alberton Panther Robotics FTC #22811 team and the middle school Analysis Paralysis FTC #28530 team. The HS Panther team once again had a totally rebuilt bot with a new 3d printed roller intake system that catastrophically broke in the first match. We scrambled to replace it with old claw designs but kept breaking parts in each match, placing 17th. The MS Analysis Paralysis team had good success with their GoBilda Robot in 3 Days kit build, but were unable to get their autonomous working. They placed 11th overall, and just missed out on alliance selection.

For the Butte Qualifier, we further refined our chassis and arm intake designs. Our major success was implementing the Roadrunner library for autonomous path planning and execution which we fine-tuned throughout the day. Our arm and claw proved to be a bit clunky and hard to control, however making teleop scoring unreliable. We ended up placing 14th, just missing out on alliance selection.

Returning to Kalispell, we had embarked on a total bot rebuild with a parallel plate design enclosing the wheels which used custom plasma cut side panels. Another major change involved the move to Java-based coding from block-based coding: a major technical challenge that would open the doors to far more complex robot capability. These big, bold changes came with a price, however, and technical complications kept us from competing most of the day. We made it on the field for the last match and  had a good start toward preparing for our first qualifier.