With names like the Notre Dame Preparatory Killer Bees, the Huron Valley Schools Heroes of Tomorrow and More Martians from Goodrich High School, you could mistake these teams for science-fiction heroes or comic book villains. But no, they're the winners of the FIRST Robotics Championship, crowned victorious out of 4,000 Michigan high school teams at Eastern Michigan University's Convocation Center.
The grueling competition spawned quarterfinals, semifinals and final rounds, with high school teams matched into three-team alliances in every battle. This year's game? Logo Motion. Students built robots which can hang inflated plastic shapes on their team's grid, competing for the highest number during a two minute, fifteen second period.
Excerpt:
If teams assemble the logo pieces on their scoring grids to form the
FIRST logo -- triangle, circle, square, in a horizontal row in that order -- the points for the entire row are doubled. The match ends with robots deploying "minibots," small
electro-mechanical assemblies that are independent of the host robot,
onto vertical poles. The minibots race to the top of the pole to trigger
a sensor and earn bonus points.
Congratulations to all the brainy teams who competed! Read the whole story
here.
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