VEX robotics may be an extracurricular activity for the Matabots, as the robotics club’s members are known, but that doesn’t mean it takes a back seat to more formal engineering projects.
“We have a passion for this, and we have the drive to do something amazing,” says Adrian Castellon, president of this year’s Matabots team and vice president of last year’s team. “This may be in a 12×12 arena playing another team, but tomorrow it could be sending a robot to another galaxy.”
Based on the 2015-16 team’s performance, the sky may well be the limit for the Matabots. The team, whose members represent all engineering disciplines, as well as the College of Science and Math and David Nazarian College of Business and Economics, started out by winning all four regional qualifiers for the world championship. In the tournaments, which took place at USC over one weekend each in November, December, January and February, the CSUN team, numbering close to 30 members, prevailed against a field of six other contenders. The different teams designed and built robots from kits to perform specific tasks established by the VEX organization, in particular to land as many balls as possible into a net while defending themselves and preventing other teams to get into theirs.
“The robot had shooting baskets down,” says Dale Conner, the professor of manufacturing systems engineering and management who served as their advisor.
Upon advancing to the world championship in Louisville, KY on April 20-23, where the top 60 teams from around the world gathered to compete, the Matabots placed fifth in their division, which included 30 teams from Spain, China, Mexico, the United Kingdom and United States. The result was a personal best for the team and has created unprecedented momentum for the coming year. Castellon, a mechanical engineering major, explains that the team members will be escalating their efforts to a more challenging level by separating into two subteams to battle it out between themselves before the different tournaments and push themselves to build the best robots they can. In addition, CSUN hosted a one-day tournament qualifier in February.
“This is a great group of students who are really self-motivated and self-directed,” says Conner. “I’m a fan.”
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