Teams of robots shoot balls into hoops of various heights, balance on bars stabilized by other robots and spin discs so they land on a certain color.
The East robotics team, also known as East Bots, is building a robot capable of all of that. They’re planning to send their robot to various FIRST Robotics competitions throughout the spring, starting with the district competitions in March, then hopefully states and even the world competition. In 2018, they made it to the quarterfinals of the world championship in Houston.
“The atmosphere is pretty cheerful [at a competition],” said freshman Lucian Genova, who does mechanical design for the team. “It’s very similar to going to a basketball game, except with less sports
jerseys.”
The making of a robot involves many steps, including electrical wiring, CAD (Computer-Aided Design), and physically assembling the robot until it is prepared to do the required tasks. Team members have said this process taught them about engineering in a practical fashion.
“One of our mechanisms is a climber,” said build captain Aidan Turnbull. “Just a big elevator with two hooks on it that extends up to the top [of the bar] and then pulls it down and climbs up.”
The climber will help balance the bar in that stage of the competition, with the assistance of robots from other teams that they have never met before. There’s only a short amount of time to build the robot. Build season, as it is called, starts in early January and goes until the first competition in March.
While the team does compete in a fall competition and teaches its members skills beforehand, they have to begin building the robot from scratch once build season begins. This means that team members have to put in fairly long hours, up to 10 hours per week.
In addition, building a robot requires copious amounts of fundraising, since the school does not provide the team’s funding. Much of this is achieved through grants and corporate sponsors, such as USA Dutch, which helps fabricate some of the parts that the team can’t create in the East shop.
“We teach members of the fundraising and outreach team, which is what we’re doing right now, to write grants and to learn how to talk to corporate sponsors,” fundraiser and marketer Kiana Taylor, an
East student, said. “So we have to assign ourselves in a really polite and professional manner.”
The building and competing of a robot isn’t all that the team does. They also show off their robot at such events as Smith’s Global Connections and the Cedars of Chapel Hill, a retirement home. Kidzu also has a partnership with the robotics team.
“There’s a huge club with tons of different sub-teams,” said sophomore Aoife Paul Healy, a fundraising and outreach team member. “And specialities you can work into. There’s a place for everybody.”
