The Toll Gate Robotics Team, also called Team 22156 from Toll Gate High School, won the 2025–2026 Rhode Island FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship on Saturday, February 7, 2026, at North Kingstown High School. Now, the team is heading to the FTC World Championship in Houston, Texas held April 29, 2026, where they will compete with teams from all over the world.
Teams from across Rhode Island took part in the competition, which featured several matches testing both robot performance and teamwork. The Toll Gate Robotics Team lost their first match because of a battery problem, but they bounced back quickly. After that, they won all their remaining matches for the preliminaries and teamed up with North Kingstown, one of the event’s top teams for the final few deciding matches.
Throughout the competition, the team improved with each round and eventually earned the highest score of 180 points in the event. In addition to winning the State Championship, they also received the Design Award for the Aesthetics and innovation of their robot, which came as a surprise to them.
The team spent months preparing major changes to their robot after a previous event. Since then, they worked about four hours each day to make improvements. Coding was one of their biggest challenges, especially the autonomous mode, which they continued to adjust during the competition.
Now, the team is getting ready for the World Championship in Houston, of which only a few teams from each state qualify, along with teams from other countries. As they keep redesigning their robot and raising money through sponsorship and fundraisers, they hope to do well on the world stage.
To get a better perspective of what it took to achieve the great accomplishment of being sent to Texas in representation of Toll Gate, we interviewed a few team members as well as the coach of the Robo Titans.
An interview with the team captain Kevin Barker
Q: What does qualifying for Worlds mean to you?
A: “For me personally, it’s a great achievement, our team spent countless hours working on making the best possible robot for this competition and we were able to. This being my last chance to go to Worlds makes it way sweeter of a win for me being able to go all the way.”
Q: How many hours went into preparing this robot?
A: “We never really kept track of how long we would spend building and fine tuning our robot. All I can say is that for the week before the competition we stayed after school until 5pm on average.”
Interview with Jackson Kavanaugh
Q: Knowing the team started out rough with a loss in the earlier matches, what would you say was the turning point when you believed that the Robo Titan team still had a chance to go all the way?
A: “To be completely honest, I thought our chances were lost after we lost one of our qualification matches. We dropped down from the top 5 all the way down to 12th. But I think when I realized that we still had a chance was when we beat one of the top teams competing, dropping their place and allowing us to break into the top 8 again.”
Q: What makes your robot or strategy different from other teams?
A: “What made our robot different from the rest of the other teams was that our robot prioritized speed over the ability to sort. For this year’s game, you can gain extra points for shooting the artifacts in a specific order specified at the beginning of the match. A lot of teams used an indexer, which slowed down their fire rate. Our robot had our intake go directly up to our launcher making our robot one of the fastest and most efficient there.”
Interview with Coach Adam Ricci
Q: “What separates this team from others at the state level?”
A: “Well overall I felt like our team was the most prepared for the state competition then it has been the last 3 years. Our team has spent a lot of time during and after school accounting for most aspects of the game. We also had the ability to make custom parts unlike most teams at the competition thanks to Jackson Kavanaugh who was able to get it running this year.”
Q: “Do you think your team is ready for the world competition?”
A: “I think we are as prepared as we can be. This is the first time our team has qualified for the world championship and I believe it will be a good learning experience to see how it is run and how Rhode Island compares to other teams around the world.”
