The Secret City Wildbots are primed for competition this weekend in the FIRST Robotics “FIRST Steamworks” challenge.

This year’s event is scheduled from Thursday, March 23, to Saturday, March 25 at Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville. It invites teams and their robots to join an adventure club and prepare their airship for flight. Teams were challenged to build their robot for collecting and placing gears on their airship for their pilots (the team’s human player) to populate gear trains to start their airships rotors, scoring fuel (“wiffleballs”) into a low goal or firing them into a high goal of their boiler in order to build up steam pressure, and lastly, climbing a rope to board their airship so they can help their pilots win the race.

The Secret City Wildbots, along with their alliance, were semi-finalists at the Palmetto Regional in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, from March 2-4. [Read more…]