On Friday, April 5th, SkillsUSA held a Robotics Competition at Linn Technical College. Participants were tasked with creating a robot and navigating it through a course, collecting blocks from mailboxes and placing them in a bucket on the outside of the course. One student drove the robot and was not able to look at the course. The other navigated by telling the driver where to go and what to do. A total of 6 teams competed in this event.
Tommy Brooks, Four Rivers student, and I went to the competition with our robot that we named Bartion. Tommy was the driver while I was the navigator. Tommy commented, “At first, [if] you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
Jacob Harshaw, senior at Four Rivers, helped us build the robot. Jacob said, “Robots are as innovative as they are frustrating.”
On April 5th at 11 A.M., Tommy and I had to take the SkillsUSA test before we were able to compete. After that we had to give an oral presentation to one of the judges as well as give him our engineering notebook. This notebook is where we documented building the robot and the different changes we made.
We then did a time trial meant to show the judges that our robot worked. Once all the presentations were completed, the competitors sat in a room where we waited our turn to complete the task.
Before our turn, we hooked up the camera to the TV that allowed Tommy to see without looking at the course. During our turn, I walked around the outside of the course, and Tommy and I worked together to get the blocks that were inside the mailboxes.
We worked on the robot for about a month and a half. Competing was a lot of hard work. Our team worked hard and had a lot of fun while doing it.