Kicking off a great year- Rebuilt Week 1:

This past weekend was an exciting time for Round Table Robotics. On January 10th, FIRST® released the official game for the Rebuilt season. Over 150 people, including our students, and students from the Racine team, Trial N’ Terror #7900, gathered at the OCHS PAEC to watch the live-streamed game reveal. Mentors, alumni, and parents rounded out the crowd.

The 2026 FRC game, titled Rebuilt, requires alliances to collect foam balls and score them into a designated goal called the ‘hub’. This game truly rebuilds previous years, being similar to the 2017 FIRST® Steamworks game and 2020 FIRST® Infinite Recharge. Robots must navigate around obstacles in the field to drive and score. Points are also awarded in the endgame and autonomous for having robots climb the tower structure.

After the reveal, RTR and TNT met back at The Forge for a delicious meal provided by Texas Roadhouse. We discussed our initial thoughts and then read and analyzed the rulebook. The following day, RTR held a team strategy meeting to discuss the game and the tasks we wanted our robot to perform. 

With week 1 underway, our subteams are hard at work. The CAD subteam has been designing and prototyping the competition robot. First and second year students are developing their skills by creating CAD of Kitbot. Finally, we have locked down our strategy for how the robot will generally function to meet our season goals. 

The Assembly subteam was very busy this week. They assembled the swerve modules, built the first chassis, and began disassembling last year’s competition robot, Barracuda. ​Meanwhile, another group was working to create prototypes for this year’s Rebuilt robot. They prototyped both a ground intake and a shooter this week. ​The Assembly team is off to a great start and is excited for what's in store this season!

This week, the Programming subteam updated our software for the 2026 season, created Alpha Bot repositories, completed drivebase code, began autonomous routines, and helped test and update the prototype hardware while collaborating with Electrical on the spec sheet.

  This week, the Electrical subteam fully wired the Alpha Bot drive train and delivered it to programmers. They are also working on unwiring the button box from our Reefscape season to repurpose its parts for this season.

Fabrication made all the parts for Alpha Bot ahead of schedule. They 3D-printed and cut parts to prototype the finished robot, and organized and cleaned the shop.

The strategy subteam familiarized itself with all the field zones that will be scored and used during the game. They also decided on a platform to use for scouting and pit scouting during competitions, as well as communicating with our scouting alliance about our thoughts on the game. 

Business and Awards were hard at work on their Impact presentation this week, completely rewriting the script from last year. They categorized all of their outreach events by the definitions FIRST® released, and afterwards, they got to ‘Rebuilding’ the script. They also got started on Impact boards for the presentation and pit handout buttons.

Finally, we would like to thank all volunteers and our Alumni mentors, Kaden, Lucas, and Derek, who came in this past week to help with the field build. They did an excellent job, tearing down the Reefscape field and building all the new elements in a record amount of time. This field is super beneficial for our team for driver practice, programming autos, prototype development, and sharing it with other teams. We cannot wait to put it to use!

 Watch the video below to learn more about our field build and what our team did this week. If you would like to visit the shop or sponsor a part of our season, please let us know!