ONTARIO — Alpha Centari, and the students of Stellar Robotics showed off a little in front of family, friends and supporters of the Richland County robotics team on Tuesday night.
The members of Stellar Robotics is made up of elementary through high school students, who are “building more than robots,” Jeff Williams, a facilitator and parent of a team member said.
“The organization at FIRST robotics is just a stunning organization. It was designed to bring up kids that had no interest in engineering, but specifically science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” Williams said. “That was the purpose of the group — to get kids involved with this, and this is a fabulous collection of nerds.
“The fact that he is spending time investing in in his future — because that is how I see it. My son is building real life skills in an incredibly encouraging environment,” he said of his son, Coulter Williams.
With Alpha Centari’s reveal, the audience witnesses the culmination of the fabrication of intense gaming, design, machining and assembly in six “stressful” weeks, many of the students admitted during the presentation.
The robot will compete in the regional tournament at the Wolstein Center Cleveland State University during the third weekend in March. The competition is a game in which robots are required to fulfill tasks consisting of rolling over defenses, throwing balls into targets and lifting the 100-plus robot in the air. The competition will be against an estimated 70 teams.
“The goal is that ultimately, we will qualify for worlds,” Williams said.
Last year, Stellar’s rookie season, the team qualified for worlds as a top-ranked rookie team, winning two regional competitions outright.
“It was nothing short of stellar,” Williams said.
The students constructed the Robot from scratch using FIRST’s limitations and rules.
“When you see this thing in action, I think you’ll really appreciate what these kids built from scratch.”
Alison Crouch, 17, involved with assembly and strategy at said the team has worked hard to get prepared for competition season. This year, the team built multiple robots, Alpha Centari the competition Robot, Beta Centari, a practice robot and to work out bugs and kinks with the robot.
The competition robot had to be kept in a bag immediately after the reveal per FIRST rules to ensure no changes were made to the robot after the six-week period. Students worked through out the week, Monday to Friday, 6 to 9 p.m. and Saturday, 1 to 6 p.m.
Williams said the team begins its creation with a video telling them the how to play the game. Then the student team begins by understanding the game.
“You have to do certain functions to earn points and they design the robot with that in mind. If you do this you get X points if you do that you get Y points,” he said.
Design is driven by actions needed to perform during the game, Williams continued. This year students were aggressive in trying to accomplish as many tasks they could.
“We feel confident we are going to hit pretty much every one of them,” Williams said. “We’ve seen other robots, and they’ll just concentrate on just shooting a ball. We can shoot a ball, but we can go over all of the defenses and we can hang the robot. The students put in hundreds of hours building this robot.”
