Our team was founded in 2011 and competed in the First Lego League (FLL) competition as the Senior Saviors and in 2012 as the Disaster Defeaters. The team was coached by Raj Neervannan and Raja Kolli. After 2 successful years as an FLL team, Team members: Anish Neervannan, Arjun Neervannan, Ganesh Kolli, Ashwin Tripathi, and Anish Joshi wanted to continue their robotics experience and chose to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge in 2013.

As a rookie team, FTC Team 8660, Charging Champion, had a very successful FTC 2014 as the only orange county team to reach the Super Regionals, one below the World Stage. From robot-building and programming skills to Computer Aided Design (CAD), outreach, fundraising and judging, the team learned many lessons. The next year, Rithik Lingineni, Rushil Gupta, Nandita Joshi, Noopur Siroya and Pallavi Kolli, joined the team, inspired by what was going on with our team.

During the 2015 FTC season, we applied the knowledge and experience from prior years that helped us win the Think Award, Connect Award, and 3rd place for the Inspire Award. Our team performed amazingly throughout the qualifying tournaments, regional and Super Regional Tournaments, and qualified as one among 128 teams out of 4000+ teams from around the world, for the World Championships!

In 2016, we decided to step it up a notch and join FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition). We have expanded our team to 25 members with students from many high schools in Irvine. We have learned a lot through our successes (and failures) from prior seasons and hope to apply them in this new challenge. We strive to have an fun, exciting and rewarding 2016-17 season, and our goal is to give our best and qualify for the World Championships this year too.