FIRST Robotics Competition
March 14-16, 2022
After a two year layoff due to the pandemic, FIRST returned to the Capital Region for three days of robotic competition. The teams come from all over the United States and the world, featuring teams from Brazil and Turkey this year. The competitors are high school students who design and build their robots from scratch to complete a series of tasks. Every year the tasks are different so every year is a new set of problems to solve. This year’s competition required robots to load cargo by firing rubber balls into baskets and having the robots climb up a series of bars off the ground.
I was there following Chatham’s Artemis Robotics Team. They started competing in 2017. It’s a dramatically smaller school than most of those in the competition so the deck was stacked against them in terms of resources. Nonetheless, they placed 26th out of 41 teams, missing entering the playoff round by a whisker. It was their best performance and the quality of their machine has improved by leaps and bounds since the beginning.
