“The Best Ever FTC Team At IMSA” – A Look At The TITANS’s 2024-2025 FTC Season

On Friday, February 28 and Saturday, March 1, IMSA TITANS (Tomorrow’s Innovators and Thinkers Acquiring New Skills) had their 5th consecutive appearance in the FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship. Founded in 2019, the TITANS are a student-run team who compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge, an annual robotics competition where teams compete to design, prototype, and build robots which compete in a sport-like game. Tournaments consist of matches between random two-team alliances, where teams are ranked based on win-loss record. In order to compete in the State Championship, teams must first advance through a series of league meets and a regional meet. 

What is FIRST Tech Challenge?

FIRST Tech Challenge, abbreviated as FTC, is one of three major robotics competitions under the organization FIRST. As FIRST themselves describe, the competition is “Way More Than Building Robots,” a nod to the complex factors that are evaluated in determining a team’s success—advancement in the competition is based upon not only robot performance but also team optics, including a team’s outreach and community service efforts. 

The other two FIRST Robotics competitions are FIRST Lego League (FLL) and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), the former being targeted towards elementary to middle school students, and the latter being an exclusively high school competition. The main difference between all three competitions is the size of the robot, with FRC having robots up to four feet tall, while FTC size limits restrict the robot to be within an 18-inch cube. While IMSA has two robotics teams offered as co-curricular activities, only one team is for FRC while the other is for FTC, and the two teams offer different types of experiences for participants, with FRC having a much larger team than the FTC team.

The 2024-2025 Season for the TITANS

This season saw several significant changes to the team, including the debut of seven new sophomore members, switching part vendors, and an increasing focus on the team’s outreach. The TITANS focused their outreach efforts in several key areas, including local legislation, partnering Rep. Barbara Hernandez, Mayor Richard Irvin, Congressman Bill Foster, and the Aurora City Council to advocate for STEM Education. Following this ethos, the TITANS started a new effort this year to create an FTC team in Nigeria with the help from their sponsor, Molex. Moreover, the team is designing a paper-based computer science curriculum to support STEM education at the Illinois Youth Center, a juvenile detention center. All in all, the team contributed 275 hours of volunteer time, supported eleven other robotics teams, partnered with 23 organizations, and impacted over 56,000 individuals around the world. 

Beyond the team’s outreach efforts, this year also included several changes for the mechanical and software sub-teams. One major change to the mechanical team was the switch from REV Robotics and ServoCity to goBILDA, a change due to the outdated infrastructure and support of the previous vendors and the more robust offerings of goBILDA. Though this resulted in an improvement in the team’s parts, it posed a continual challenge for the team as they struggled to source the parts they needed for their league meets and lacked a strong parts base, as the REV and ServoCity parts were incompatible with the goBILDA parts systems. Despite this, the team persisted and made do with the resources available to them, and ultimately were able to design and iterate a competitive robot ranked amongst the best in the state. 

Lastly, the software sub-team also shifted in a new direction this year, with the team opting to use PedroPathing, a rising new software library for programming the robot’s autonomous movements, over RoadRunner, a more popular and established library. This change was able to improve the robot’s performance during its autonomous—a 30 second period at the start of each match where the robot uses only pre-programmed input to score points. Due to the difficulty of achieving a reliable autonomous program, this 30 second period is an opportunity for teams to gain an advantage early in the match, often making the distinction between an amateur team and an experienced one; often in the lower-level league meets, one will find that many teams have little to no autonomous action whatsoever. This is not the case, however, in the Illinois State Championship, where nearly every team has a functional autonomous program. This year the TITANS were able to stand out at the State Championship as one of the highest scoring teams in autonomous, consistently scoring five of this year’s game elements, a tally only a handful of other teams were able to replicate.

Though the TITANS had a slow start to the season, having relatively unremarkable performances at each league meet, their efforts towards their regional event saw them qualify for the State Championship, the fifth time in a row for the team since their founding. 

State Championship In Review

The Illinois State Championship is structured with two divisions of twenty-two teams. Each team plays five qualification matches in their division, which ranks them based on their win/loss record. Following this, the top six teams of each division will become “alliance captains” and will be able to choose one other team to complete their alliance. These alliances then compete in a double elimination tournament within their division, where the winning alliance from one division plays the other to determine the state champion. The two winning teams will then earn two of the four spots for advancing to worlds, with the other two spots reserved for winners of the prestigious Inspire Award, which a team earns by displaying a strong embodiment of all aspects of FIRST and FTC.

From a combination of software and mechanical iterations, the TITANS’s robot and driver team was able to put on a strong performance this Saturday, earning 4th place in their division. Becoming the captain of the 4th alliance, the TITANS chose 8th place team 8620 Wormgear Warriors to become their alliance partner. This decision was tactical, as the Wormgear Warriors’s robot was able to complement the TITANS’s robot well, resulting in the duo beating out almost every other alliance to reach the playoffs finals, where they succumbed to teams 10091 N.Y.A.N. (Not Your Average Nerds) and 10415 Warbots, the former having the 22nd best average match score in the entire world. 

Despite not advancing further, the team are proud to have established themselves as one of the top performers at the Illinois State Championship, having achieved qualification for FIRST’s Premier robotics events—a prestigious collection of events that a select number of teams are invited to participate in during the off-season—and competing against some of the best teams in the world. As robotics mentor and Makerspace Manager Grant Bell puts it, “This is the best FTC team I’ve seen here in my time at IMSA.” With the TITANS in their off-season, their focus now is to continue to improve and to return next year even stronger as they push for the first-ever World Championship qualification for any robotics team at IMSA.