GRAND FORKS — This weekend robots and their handlers from all over the United States and Canada will be invading Grand Forks at the Alerus center.
After six months of planning, UND is partnering with Bifrost Manufacturing to host a robotics competition for middle and high school robotics programs and it’s free for students.
Out of 45 robots, one was like no other.
“We used a system that I’ve never seen on any other robot, so you have a couple pieces of metal flip up as the ring is pushed up, but when they’re on the bar, they’ll apply pressure on it down,” Henry Wade, member of the Fellowship of the Rings robotic team from Tennessee, said. “And so it’s not pressure on one half of the ring which tends to get it caught on there. It’s pressure on the entirety of the ring, and that pushes it down.”
The Fellowship of the Rings was able to win its first match in the North Dakota VEX Robotics Signature Event. They started preparing for this competition in January. It’s the team’s fifth competition so far this year.
“Since we had to fly with the robot, we made sure that everything was packed correctly. So we’ve got saws trying to hold everything in the suitcase,” Wade said. “We were invited to go to a school to practice on some of the fields.”
They used that time to focus on time management and brainstorming. Their robot must be able to grab rings and place them onto stakes in the field, or climb up a ladder in just two minutes.
“It’s helped me a lot with learning to kind of visualize how to build something realistically,” Wade said.
That’s UND’s goal for the competition, besides teams having a chance to earn a ticket to the World Championships in May.
“We’re trying to basically create the next generation of scientists, engineers, technicians,” Andrew Dahlen, a mechanical engineering lecturer at UND, said. “Because, right now, one in three engineering jobs goes unfilled, and these are high-wage, high-demand jobs, and we want to build up the talent that’s here today to prepare for that workforce.”
My name is Anne Sara, better known as Sara.
I was born an only child in Port-au-prince, Haiti and moved to the U.S at the age of 2.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is where I was raised.
After graduating with my bachelor degree at Albright College, I moved to Florida to continue my studies.
WDAY is the reason why I moved to North Dakota.
