An Indian River High School team is earning state recognition for robotics. This year was Indian River’s most successful robotics competition season ever. Emily Griffin met with the students behind the bots to see how it works.
PHILADELPHIA, New York (WWNY) – When the timer starts, so do the robots.
The Indian River Robotics Team can only watch as thousands of lines of coding, dozens of wires, and countless hours of effort take off.
“The autonomous is, basically the robot sensing and controlling itself,” Evan Young said. “We code the robot to do a preset task and use sensors on the robot to perform said task.”
Once the autonomous portion has run, the kids take control.
For every block, ball and duck they can maneuver, points are racked up in competition.
“Our program has done really well this year,” Hunter Horton said. “We actually got the high score for our state, 280 points, which is 50 points above the second highest score.”
The competition is fierce.
“Unlike sports, there aren’t multiple divisions in robotics,” Young said, “It’s, like, the best of the best all across the state.”
Out of 150 teams, Indian River placed second overall at states.
“Everything is built from scratch,” Alexander Billings said. “We put as much effort as we can into it. We stay after school every day since September until March, so a lot goes into this program.”
“Most people when they hear robotics, they think battle bots, stuff like that,” Vanessa Wing said, “but it’s not all, you know, battle bots and all of that. There are different little things that go on in it. Like, this broke, how do you fix that without this, this, and this. It’s a lot of ingenuity trying to fit everything together to try to make the best of what you’re doing.”
This robotics season has come to a close, but these students are far from powering down.
This was only the school’s sixth year with a robotics team. Team members say their big goal is to make it to the world competition.
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