2026 Season

This season, the OWL Open Circuits competed at EMCC, Eagan’s Week Zero, and the North Star Regional. During the preseason, in addition to preparing for the EMCC competition, our team focused on improving our CAD skills, deep-cleaning our workshop and storage closet, taking apart old game elements, and, most importantly, training newer members so they could enter the season with as much knowledge and experience as possible.

Once the season officially began in January, our team quickly started building our robot. Before the game was revealed, we chose to focus on developing one element of the game so we could get a head start on our design. Once this year’s challenge was announced, however, we changed our approach and designed a robot that could collect fuel from the ground, transport it through the robot, and shoot it into the Hub.

After six weeks of hard work, we competed at Eagan’s Week Zero. During the competition, we encountered several electrical connection issues that gave us valuable experience troubleshooting our robot under competition conditions. We also discovered that collecting fuel through the cutout in our bumper was more difficult than we had anticipated. We took this information into consideration as we continued preparing for the North Star Regional.

During the last week of March, our team spent four days at the North Star Regional. The first day was dedicated to practice, inspection, and preparing the robot for competition. We encountered several issues related to keeping our driver station system up to date, which made the process of getting our robot competition-ready more difficult than it needed to be. After a long day of troubleshooting and waiting for our robot to become legal and up to date, we were ready to compete on Friday and Saturday.

On Friday, we quickly discovered that our intake was not as effective as we had hoped, although it was still functional. Later in the day, the intake chain came off, so we shifted our strategy toward playing defense. This ended up being a successful decision, as our robot was particularly effective at preventing other robots from scoring. On Saturday, our swerve drivetrain began experiencing issues. Unfortunately, we were unable to identify the cause until the competition had ended. We ultimately finished 34th out of 47 teams.