RONAN — Expectations were running high for the Ronan High School club team going into last Friday’s FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition in Bozeman. Performing several last-minute preparations on the machine last Wednesday, junior team member Troy McMillan made sure to emphasize the team’s main focus.

“My goal is to get to Atlanta before I graduate,” McMillan said last week, noting the location of the national championships. “I’m most confident that this is the year. We just need to do some fine-tuning.”

While not quite completing its goal, the RHS team still had quite a bit of success while competing at the Montana State University campus. The team took fourth out of 16 total teams and nine different schools from across the state, as well as one from Wyoming. The finish is leaps and bounds for a team that was first organized 5 years ago, with McMillan as one of the founding members. In addition, team coach and RHS technology teacher Jesse Gray said the team was recognized with the Innovate award, a trophy that deals with robot design, efficiency and thinking outside the box.

“That’s probably one of the highest awards given besides the overall award,” Gray said. “It’s not just the design, but the team’s performance and engineering.”

The award says a lot about this team’s hard work and preparation. McMillan said the team started building in December and worked many long hours in the days leading up to the competition. Each team is given a similar kit, but it is their discretion on how exactly to build it.

The robot’s main body is made of a soft aluminum, the ball “flipper” is made of polycarbonate plastic and the machine has a “brain” that connects via Bluetooth short-range wireless connector so it is unencumbered by wires. The only requirement is that at the beginning of a round, the robot must be no more than 18 inches high, wide or long.

Once the round begins, robots can expand, meaning that teams’ engineer the machines to mechanically unfurl and become bigger. These requirements create many intricate parts of the robot, which the team has to constantly make sure are in full working order.

“We had a little bit of some mechanical issues, including jamming of the ball lifter,” Gray said after the competition. “We made adjustments the whole day, and did a lot of tweaking.”

Like most sports, scoring points is the name of the game, and there are a few ways to do that.

McMillan said the objective is to control your robot to scoop up Wiffle balls and shoot them in to different targets, each worth a variety of points. Four teams take to the closed-in arena each round. In the center of the floor sits a tray, worth one point. A 3-foot high standing net target is worth five points and a tray outside the arena floor is worth 10 points. The outside goal is only accessible in the last 30 seconds of a two and a half minute round, and a yellow ball dispensed with 30 seconds to go doubles the amount of points in any goal it is scored.

The teams’ dispense the balls from a chute on each of four corners with the arm of their robot. Incorrectly dispensing the ball results in docked points, as does touching a middle piece of PVC pipe.

Two people are needed to control the machines, and McMillan and sophomore Thane Tobol were put in charge during the competition. The two use controllers, similar to that of a video game console, connected to a computer that connects wirelessly with the robot brain. Each has a different assignment: McMillan controls the wheels and the direction while Tobol works the ball shooter. The pair had to make sure they knew intuitively what the other was thinking.

“We have to do some strategizing to know our game plan and what we want to do,” McMillan said during their last planning session before the team left for Bozeman.

Despite not finishing first, Gray said the team enjoyed the trip and the experiences they had, and that no matter what, he’s proud of them.

“They performed really well,” he said. “Overall they had a great weekend.