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CLEMSON — The floor of Littlejohn Coliseum at Clemson University was a mix Saturday afternoon of Hollywood, hip-hop and technology.
At the seventh annual FIRST Robotics Competition Palmetto Regional, about 1,000 high school students from as close as Seneca and as far away as Gravatai, Brazil, put their custom-built robots to the test for a spot in the upcoming FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics International Competition set to happen at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta in April.
The competition Saturday was a battle of the minds, set to adrenaline-pumping music, that resembled an episode of the television show “BattleBots.”
Starting at 8 a.m., teams with names like Los Pollos Locos and the Bananas uncrated their 50-pound, remote-controlled robots, set up shop in the pit area located on one side of the coliseum floor and fine-tuned the machines.
Starting at 9:30 a.m., the 33 teams were called in groups of six to the other side of the gigantic partition separating the pits from the competition area.
Because the robots are too heavy and too valuable to carry, team members rolled them on carts.
Each team had one member dedicated to ensuring the path from the pit to the competition floor was clear.
“If we drop it, we’re finished,” one high school boy said in passing.
As the teams unloaded the robots and placed them on the floor, the music slowly increased in volume, the high-pitched announcer’s voice announced the team number and the crowd cheered.
For the next few minutes, the robots went at it guided by the hands of a driver and a lifter from each team who stood behind plastic glass and communicated with the machine via wireless remote.
The driver, one competitor said, was responsible for getting the robot around the course. The lifter was responsible for ensuring that the steady stream of volleyballs being fed to the robot by an overhead ramp made it into the robot’s launching mechanism.
The launching mechanism on every robot was different. Some were paddles, others were spring-loaded bars with enough tension to launch the volleyballs into a “mousetrap”.
Some paddles worked, others did not.
Contact between the robots was allowed.
The crowd cheered whenever robots collided. They cheered louder when robots collided and one flipped over.
The teams accumulated points based on how many volleyballs their robots deposited in the mousetrap during the timed events.
Over the next six hours, teams were eliminated while others moved on through the quarterfinals, semifinals and final rounds.
By the time it ended, only three teams, including one from Seneca, went away with gold medals.
They were Metal-in-Motion, made up of high school students from Oconee County School District, Robo-Raiders, composed of high school students from Columbia’s Richland County School District one and the RoboLions, composed of students from Peachtree High School in Suwanee, Ga.
The teams will advance to the international competition in Atlanta.
Lizzie Adkins is a member of the Los Pollos Locos team from Columbia.
A junior at Dreher High School who is ranked third in her class and hopes to attend Princeton University, Adkins said participating in the FIRST competition was hard work, but worthwhile.
“It is very gratifying to spend so much time building something as part of a team and then seeing it function that way it is supposed to,” she said.
Adkins said the Los Pollos Locos team has spent “anywhere from 15 to 20 hours” each week since January designing, building and testing its robot.
The Los Pollos Locos made it all the way to the semi-finals at Saturday’s competition.
