Copper Country Robotics, the FIRST robotics team at Michigan Technological University, helped local schools kick off this year’s competition season Saturday by livestreaming their progress on building a robot in less than 72 hours.
The Robot in 3 Days challenge has college teams show the process they take to create a robot that can compete in regular competitions.
“We’re going to have everybody break off into different prototype groups, coding, CAD, doing all of that stuff so that they can figure out what they want to do,” said David Reves, a member of Copper Country Robotics. “I think the biggest thing for us today is at least we get some prototypes out to the community, so we’re going to film everything, post everything so that everybody can see what works well and what doesn’t work so well.”
Reves said it’s a big challenge to build a functional robot in three days. When many of the team’s members were in high school, teams had six weeks to work on designs and construction.
“By the end of the three days, we want a robot that we can film, that we can be proud of,” Reves said. “But across all these days, really we just want to advertise to the community what exactly we’re doing.”
Copper Country Robotics will put down the drills and stop soldering wires Tuesday at noon. Throughout the Upper Peninsula, high school robotics teams will also get started on their projects.
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