On February 15, the LigerBots won the Week 0 pre-season competition at Merrimack High School in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

In this year’s game, robots need to score with two different game pieces, one a PVC pipe called “coral” and the other a green playground ball called “algae”. We were excited to compete with our robot, which we named Hydra! Hydra was designed and built over the past 8 weeks, based on many different designs by our team members to compete in this competition.

The night before the competition, we loaded Hydra into theLigerBots trailer for transport. Early the next morning, over 30 team members were transported via carpools from Starbucks in Newtonville to Merrimack High School.

We competed in four of the 16 qualifying matches, winning three. As the #1 ranked team, we led the top alliance and selected Team 190 (Gompei and the Herd) and Team 5422 (Stormgears). Our alliance won every playoff match, securing both the event championship and our team’s #1 overall ranking out of the 31 teams.

We learned a lot from this competition! In particular, our climber needs more tuning so that it can be more consistent, and our power chain needs to be reinforced more. But more importantly, we know this season is going to rock! This was the best possible way to warm up for the upcoming competition season and we hope to do just as well at the next few competitions. Our first official competition, Granite State hosted by ……., is on March 1-2 in Salem, NH. Join us in person or on the livestream!