Welcome to our 2025 FIRST Robotics build season! Our BEAST Robotics team came together on Saturday, January 4, to watch the official announcement of this season’s competition.
REEFSCAPE presented by Haas is going to be an exciting challenge. The theme is underwater exploration and maintaining an ecosystem, so the game pieces are named accordingly. “Coral” is made out of 12-inch pieces of PVC pipe, and “Algae” is a 16-inch playground ball. There are also metal frames, called Cages, from which the robots can hang and a “Barge” for depositing Algae.
During a match, robots will need to collect Coral and place the Coral on the Reef. The Reef is made up of four levels of angled rods that have different scoring values. The Reef will have Algae on it at the beginning of the match, so robots will need to dislodge the Algae to have access to all the scoring potential on the Reef. Algae can be deposited in the Barge or delivered to the human player via the Processor. It will be an interesting challenge to design a robot that can handle both PVC pipes and playground balls.
At the end of the match, robots can either park in the Barge area or hang from the Cages. Designing a hanging mechanism that can support a robot that weighs up to 140 pounds is always a fun task!
To better understand how the competition is going to look, watch this short video from FIRST explaining the challenge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWbxcjlY9JY
During the first week, our team was busy studying the game manual and coming up with our initial design. We divided the team into small groups to tackle key aspects of the game, such as an arm to deposit Coral and a mechanism to climb the Cage. Subteams also did everything from updating software for the new game, to creating a Kahoot to reinforce the Reefscape rules. Meanwhile, our Field Team built the Reef and Barge so we can test our prototypes.
Thanks to the generous support of the Elmbrook School District, the Elmbrook Education Foundation, and our sponsors, we also have our full-size AndyMark field. In the spirit of “Coopertition,” we are inviting local teams to practice with their robots on our field. We feel very fortunate to have our dedicated robotics space, and we want to share it with our robotics community.
We have about ten weeks to design, build, program and test a competition-ready robot, so we’ve officially kicked into high gear! Please follow us on Facebook, X, or Instagram!
Let’s have a great season!