By Angi Agle

The Smoky Mountain Regional robotics competition kicked off Thursday with practice rounds, and qualification matches began Friday morning.

The theme of this year’s game is “Recycle Rush.” Robots are to pick up recycle bins, put foam noodles in trash cans, and stack all of them in the center of the field. Additional points are gained for the number of containers stacked.

Human players feed foam noodles into the trash cans as the robots hold them up to a hole in the plexiglas, as well as feeding gray recycle bins into the field for the robots to stack.

Team 4265, the Secret City Wildbots, experienced some technical challenges, which were expected to be resolved Friday morning. [Read more…]