NJIT Robotics Club Qualifies for Vex World Championships Tournament

NJIT's robotics club just stamped its ticket to the world championships tournament of a top-level league, despite competing as underdogs this season after all of its top members graduated last year.

Chief engineer Yichao Zhang and lead programmer Dale Nacianceno — the former a senior, the latter a freshman — are leading the Highlanders to Louisville, Ky. to play in a tournament comprising up to 92 teams, after qualifying with a victory at a College of Southern Maryland tournament in February.

The league is operated by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, which is a non-profit in Greenville, Texas, using parts and software from the foundation's co-founders at Vex Robotics, also of Greenville. Their championship tourney remains scheduled for April 23-26 despite widespread event cancellations due to COVID-19 concerns, officials said, although that could change. Overall caliber of play may decline this year with fewer of the dominant teams from China registered because of travel restrictions, students noted.

The game, which will be live-streamed, changes every year. For this year's version, teams earn points by stacking cubes or placing cubes on towers, club president Jason Morgado explained. There are strategies to play offense by stacking and placing as many cubes as possible, or to play defense by blocking your opponent's robot in a corner. Cubes of certain colors when placed on towers are point multipliers for all players, so your team would avoid towers if your opponent has more cubes of that color than you do.

Each team has two robots playing simultaneously. One is large and one is small. Most teams design one robot for stacking and the other for towers, or perhaps one for both tasks and the other for defensive maneuvers. NJIT took a rare approach in that both robots do both tasks.

"I'm surprised we're able to make it this far," said Morgado, a junior computer science major from Bergenfield. "I remember last year when the rest of the executive board was leaving, I was pretty much the only person left in the club, and then Yichao just walks in during office hours and says, 'I'm going to carry you guys to worlds' — and he did."

Zhang had experience with Vex competitions at New York Institute of Technology before transferring here. Consistency and staying on schedule are the main lessons he brought to New Jersey.

"There are many matches to be played at a tournament, and the consistent performance of our robots is the foundation of success. I am very proud of my team as we followed our planned schedule and didn't wait until the last minute to build our robots. We had more time to practice and test our robots after finalizing our ideas. During testing, we exposed a lot of mechanical problems and were able to enhance our design accordingly so that less and less problems will occur during a competition. Because of the consistent performance, we're able to secure victory in most of the matches," Zhang explained.

Teams must build most of their robots using parts from Vex and adhere to strict technical specifications, but there is room for innovation in how the parts are arranged and the occasional use of custom or 3D-printed components. NJIT's team used 3D-printed stoppers to ensure their cube-grabbing arm did not wobble laterally in its lowered position. The software also comes from Vex and is based on the mainstream C++ language, which students can program as they like. Nacianceno, the programmer, is a computer science major who led his high school Vex team in South Brunswick.

Zhang cited a design hack to avoid an engineering compromise. Cubes are gripped on two sides by roller mechanisms, which must be tight enough to grip even when several other cubes are already loaded, but not so tight as to obstruct when the cubes are released onto stacks or towers. Most teams try to find a balance in the gripping tension, but Zhang designed a way for cubes to avoid the grippers entirely during the releasing phase.

Zhang intends to pursue a master's degree elsewhere next year. He said his robotics club experience is a major factor in his applications. As for Morgado, he and the rest of his officers want to expand the club membership for people working on personal projects, especially among mechanical engineering students. He also said the team is looking into other competitions such as the IEEE Micromouse game in which robots try to solve mazes.

Morgado's own project is a Rubik's Cube solver. Before he can finish it, he's learning to solve the puzzle by hand — but that's an area where robots can do things for us.

Update: The world championships tournament was canceled. Read the announcement here.