RoboRoos

Amber and her robotics team, the RoboRoos, recently flew to Sydney to take on teams from around the country at the First Robotics Championship.

Hi BTN my name’s Amber and we're building robots. We're part of a competition team that builds robots for FRC which is the First Robotics Challenge. For the first couple of weeks we have what is called the design phase where we get a group of people around and design what type of robots we are going to build. The most challenging part would be agreeing on a design, because a lot of people have very strong opinions about particular things about the robot and you have to compromise with them.

We have a mechanical team - which is basically just the team that builds everything so they do all the drilling and the hacksawing and putting stuff together. We have the electrical team - which does all the wiring which makes the robot work. We do the software - which is kind of writing the software to make the robot work. We have pneumatics - which is linking up all the air hoses together to make things move in and out. Do we have anything else?

Behind us we have multiple prototypes of the same robot. We have a Bob, we have a Kevin and we have a Steve, it’s very hard deciding what to go with.

This year’s competition is called FIRST Steamworks, so it’s a steampunk themed type of competition. So this is the FIRST robotics competition and a match is about to start so people are getting excited, we're dancing to the music, It's really, really exciting. So far we've assembled the robot in the pits, we've got the software working and in our first match we scored 256 points which is a lot and we've won our first match which is a good start to the day.

Right now we're in the queuing lane so we're queuing for our next match. It's a shared field and you will be competing a game of about 2 minutes and 30 seconds which is quite short when you're actually driving the robot in competition. We have to collect gears from loading stations and place them on air shifts, we have to shoot balls or load balls into boilers and we have to climb up a rope.

We're going to Houston!

Working with people here is really good cause everyone has really similar interests. We’re all interested in STEM, which is Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics. So it’s really good having those people around you and its positive energy which is really good.

• Jack Evans | Reporter
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