Fishy Business Inc., the robotics team from Ocosta High School, competed in the FIRST World Championship in Houston, Tex., April 18-22. A few glitches kept them out of the championship race, but the team performed well in some of their earlier heats.

The team qualified for the world championship round by placing second among 73 teams at a regional event in Tacoma in March. There were five teams from Washington among the 128 overall invited to the FTC World Championship round.

Fishy Business team members include Enapay Croy, Aaron Doull, Evan Smith, Kaylie Prieur, Samantha Starkey, Kaden Smith and Markay Williams. Mentor Joe Prieur, father of Kaylie, is a team mentor and accompanied the team to Houston, where they competed in the Franklin Division.

The competition is judged in sections, including an autonomous section that tests the robot’s programming, a section judging the team’s notebooks kept throughout the season, and robot on robot competition. The latter includes shooting balls into a hoop and nudging sensors at the edge of the competition field to turn on lights.

The team arrived in Houston April 18 to find their robot had been damaged during transport, so they repaired the robot in their hotel room, replacing the shooting mechanism. The next day the team was interviewed by competition officials and the robot was inspected. According to Prieur, the team put the robot through its paces on the practice field, where it performed well, and team confidence was high.

The first qualifying match didn’t go well, as the robot’s autonomous setting didn’t work correctly, costing them the match. The second match didn’t go much better; the autonomous function completely failed, resulting in a 40 point penalty and loss of the match. The same issue occurred in the third match, again resulting in a penalty and loss.

Adjustments were made to the robot, and the team won their next match. The following match had the robot running well but the result was another loss for the team. The robot was running well during the sixth match, which the team won. That result wound up being the fourth highest scoring performance in the championships.

The team won only one of their final three matches. In the end, Fishy Business wound up ninth in the division in ranking points and tied for second highest in the autonomous period, which tests the programming of the robot. During qualifying matches, competing teams have another team alongside; the pairing is called an alliance.

“Although our robot was working perfectly by the end of qualifications, our technical problems early on kept us from reaching a captain position and apparently was a factor in the alliance captain’s confidence in our ability to perform as we were not selected to be in an alliance,” said Prieur. “With only nine qualifications matches, we knew every match counts. The team remained confident in their abilities and maintained a gracious attitude.”