By: Siyona Singhal

Humor Editor

After a long 2025 competition season, the LGHS Robotics team, Iron Claw, is getting ready for their first tournament of the school year.

Every year, Bellarmine College Preparatory, home to the Cheesy Poofs, hosts Chezy Champs. 46 robotics teams compete against each other with the same robot as their competition season, which ended in April. The 2025 season game was Reefscape, an underwater-themed match where teams had to score pieces of coral and algae to collect points. Reefscape will also be the game played at Chezy. Iron Claw has been working hard after school to prepare for the three-day-long competition.

One of the Technical Project Managers of the team, senior James Smith, commented on how the team has been preparing: “We’ve had a group of students go out to Mountain View, where there’s a practice field, and we’ve been going there every weekend to get prepared and get things dialed down.” Currently, the team’s main focus is improving the reliability and sturdiness of the robot, as that was a major problem in the competition season. Smith explained that the biggest challenge of leading the team is “getting back onto our feet since our team manager, [Rodrigo Coppelli], left last year. Working with [Lalitha Maruvada] has been great, and we’re starting to get our systems down.” To delegate responsibilities, the Iron Claw leadership team has rolled out a new task management system, making sure everyone knows their jobs. 

Junior and Control Systems subteam Lead Avik Agrawal is adapting to his new leadership role. He explained that the hardest part of his job is making sure everyone on the sub-team has meaningful work to do that contributes to the success of the team. To fix this issue, Agrawal has been “spending a lot of time on [the team’s task managing system] and assigning tasks to people.” Agrawal has also been working towards the team’s goal of improving the robot’s reliability by “creating new procedures for troubleshooting [Controller Area Network (CAN)] errors, along with researching new kinds of connectors for the CAN bus.”

Senior Eric Jacobson, a lead on the Programming subteam, is excelling in his role. For the 2025 competition season, Jacobson created the scouting app, which the team used during matches to track other teams and the points scored during a match. He commented that the hardest part of making the app was “learning how to code and react with no prior knowledge in JavaScript. Also, there’s a range of people that you have to instruct. Accommodating for certain people’s needs was something that I struggled with.” Jacobson is most looking forward to “seeing our robot in full motion because our robot was really good last year, but because of technical issues, we couldn’t see it run a lot during competitions, so I’m excited to see it on the field working well.”

Iron Claw Robotics is working around the clock to get ready for Chezy Champs. With improved reliability and great leadership, they’re sure to return with a victory!