SHELBY – Richland County’s youngest robotics experts are preparing to take on a different-era challenge this spring.
On Saturday, the FIRST Robotics Competition announced that its 2017 challenge theme would be “STEAMWORKS,” a nod to the popular Steampunk trend. High school students from the local Stellar Robotics team awaited the announcement anxiously, ready to get started brainstorming and building.
“The game changes every single year, so we had no idea what the game would be,” said Eric Watts, an Ontario senior who has been part of the Stellar Robotics team for three years. “We’ll come up with a bunch of designs for our robot and a strategy, because there’s a lot of ways to score points so we have to figure out which ways we want to do it.”
The “game” Watts mentioned refers to the FIRST Robotics Competitions the team will take on this March in Cleveland and Springfield. According to team administrator Chantal DeYoe, the atmosphere of the game is on par with any sporting event.
“When we go to a competition the field we’re on is pretty close to the size of a basketball court,” DeYoe said. “Our robots are 2.5 by 3 feet in diameter and 120 pounds, and we play three on three. They’ve got music going loud, thousands of kids in the arena and it’s just a lot of fun.”
This year, the STEAMWORKS game theme takes competitors back to the Victorian era of the Industrial Revolution. Robots will be tasked with lifting off an “airship” by delivering gears, adding “fuel” to the boilers and securing the robots to the ship before time runs out.
The Stellar Robotics team got a glimpse of this year’s course via video on Saturday.
“They complete tasks to score points and rank high at the end of the competition,” DeYoe explained. “We want to understand the game as completely as possible at the end of the day – how you score points, what tasks are associated with scoring points, and which points score higher.”
Stellar Robotics earned the State Championship in 2015, and placed second at the state competition in 2016. Watts said the biggest lesson the team took away from last year’s robot was preparing for repairs.
“Last year it was really well-designed but it wasn’t designed well to be worked on, so any time something broke we had to basically take it apart and fix it, which is really time consuming and you only have so much time between matches,” Watts said. “Our goal this year is to make it more modular.”
In addition to continuing their trend of excellence, Stellar Robotics is continuing to grow. DeYoe said the team has 20 members of all ages this year, with an increased interest at the elementary level.
“There’s tons of interest at the elementary age level, we’re actually limited by the number of adults we’ve got to help,” she said. “We’re always looking for new mentors who have skills in programming or design.”
The team’s continued growth also pleases one of their main sponsors, ArcelorMittal. Plant manager Bill Chomic visited the team on Saturday to announced ArcelorMittal would be increasing their sponsorship by 25 percent thanks to the enthusiasm and performance of Stellar Robotics.
“We’re happy to support the team, it supports the things we need as an industry,” Chomic said. “Kids don’t realize there’s a lot of opportunity here. We go out of the area to hire engineers not because we want to, but because they’re not here. I came on board here to try to help change that.”
DeYoe echoed that one of the main goals of Stellar Robotics is to get students involved in engineering and staying in Richland County.
“There’s still a sense where a lot of kids don’t know what engineering is and how it applies to life,” DeYoe said. “We get a lot of kids in here really hesitant to approach the robot and touch it; young women are often uncertain about that as a potential career opportunity. We’re broadening their horizons and making them aware of the opportunities that are available.”
For Watts, he plans to graduate this year and attend the University of Cincinnati to study engineering. Future career prospects is also what drew junior Andrew Coffman to Stellar Robotics.
“My plan is eventually to go into mechanical engineering, so I figured this would be a good place to get some knowledge of how to do that,” Coffman said. “And robotics is definitely the thing I’m interested in.”
