Local robotics team finishes competition season with stellar showing

With 15 seconds left on the clock, robot 4467 glided to one corner of the floor where a triad of uneven bars stood, extended its arms and hoisted itself onto the middle bar.

Time expired. The region’s Titanium Titans were moving on to the next round.

“We did really well, better than we have in any other year,” said team captain Ian Orsag, a 10-grade home-schooled student who lives in Upper St. Clair.

Earlier this month, Orsag and 19 other area students spent four days in Knoxville, where their robot advanced to the quarterfinals – the second time the team made it that far during the 2022 FIRST Robotics competition season, and the furthest the team has made it in competitions since its inception 10 years ago.

The team finished competition with a top eight placing at Smoky Mountain and returned home with hardware: The Innovation in Control Award, presented for their robot’s control system, including its swerve drive programming.

“The targeting algorithm that the students wrote for actually being able to do vision and then track with the turret is super impressive,” said Tim Angert, a founding member and head coach of the Titanium Titans, and machine shop manager for the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s an impressive robot, and it’s built by a bunch of impressive students.”

Since two local teams merged in 2013, the Titanium Titans has offered local students a space to meet likeminded people, learn leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills and compete against other FIRST Robotics teams nationwide.

FIRST Robotics is an international organization that challenges high school students to design, program and build industrial-sized robots for competition.

“We call FIRST Robotics Competition the ultimate Sport for the Mind,” the organization’s website reads.

Each year, FIRST Robotics releases a game via livestream. The Titanium Titans spend a few days setting goals and strategizing before setting to work designing a robot in a Computer-Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) program.

Once the design is just right, the team gets to work building a giant, functioning robot. The design and build process takes about six weeks, Orsag said.

During build season, the team spends more than 22 hours each week meeting at its education center in Donaldsons Crossroads (the space was acquired through a grant), the Armory Youth Center in Canonsburg and on other local teams’ practice fields, where the Titanium Titans practice driving their robot with a remote control.

Competition season kicks off in February.

“We’re obviously a team and we have to work together to create our robot. There’s a lot ... between designing, programming and wiring,” said Andrew Mueller, a senior at Canon-McMillan. “It really shows what you can do with a group of people, with a group of kids, teenagers.”

When the team isn’t competing, students spend the off-season sharpening coding, CADD and wiring skills, hosting workshops and running summer camps. The Titanium Titans robot makes appearances at local farmers markets, and the team marches in community parades.

“It’s really important to us to give back to the community,” said Orsag. “We’ve benefitted from the community a lot.”

The team also recruits new members, an outreach effort led by Elisa Hager, a cyberschool senior from Monongahela.

“I’ve gotten a lot of chances, being the outreach lead, to teach kids about STEM, which I really enjoy,” said Elisa Hager, a cyber-schooled senior from Monongahela. “In addition to STEM skills ... I’ve learned a lot about being able to talk to people, being able to lead and organize.”

Orsag added that introducing STEM to elementary and middle school students is part of the team’s mission.

“What we’ve done over the past 10 years, since our inception, is essentially build a pipeline to take students from elementary school and get them very interested in STEM at that young age,” he said. “There are programs for them all the way up through high school.”

And those programs teach more than just STEM skills.

“It prepares students a lot for college or the workforce by teaching them things such as teamwork or even ... public communication skills,” said Logan Hollowood, an eighth-grade home-schooled student from Washington.

That rings true for Robert Thomas, a 10th-grader at Thomas Jefferson, who said before joining Titanium Titans, he was painfully shy.

“I feel like I’ve learned how to put myself out there a little more,” he said. “I’ve learned valuable skills that aren’t going to go away.”

David Bunton said he focused his college application essay around his Titanium Titans experience.

“It’s had such a large impact on my life,” he said. “The biggest things are probably learning to appreciate working collaboratively with others in a team-based structure and also kind of learning how to be a leader.”

For more information on Titanium Titans, or to become involved, visit https://titaniumtitans.org/.