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The Robotics Kickoff took place in the iLab last Saturday, hosting Robotics Club students, parents, and alumni for the grand reveal of this season’s Robotics tournament game. Nearly 60 people attended the start of the 2026 Robotics season, watching as FIRST revealed their game of the season.

At 9:00 a. m., students and parents came to St. Louis U. High for a short informative meeting on the upcoming season.

 “This year, we decided we want a lot of parent engagement,” said senior Thomas Schlidt. “That’s something that this club has been lacking for a while.” 

Parent support was garnered by the RoboBills with a showcase of past year’s robots and games.

 “We showed them the old robot from last year and talked about how this club runs,” said Schlidt. “We got a lot of parents who were interested.” 

This year’s game is called Rebuilt, and involves grabbing foam balls and going back to your home base and shooting them into a basket. At the end of the game, there’s a ladder the robots will climb with three different bars, and the more a robot climbs, the more points it gets.

After the game was revealed, the RoboBills immediately got to work deciphering the nearly 130 page rulebook and deciding on plans for the season. 

“We wanted to figure out what strategy leaves us with enough balls to either score with or deliver to a teammate,” said Schlidt. “We need to end up with the most possible total points.”

The RoboBills, before the game had even been announced, had already put in countless hours of work and effort into their robots for the year. 

“One of the things that we’ve always been saying is that we wanted to have vision in our robots,” said Schlidt. “There are these things called April Tags and they work as QR codes, so a camera attached to your robot with the required code will give your robot a kind of vision.”

The most successful teams in years past have used this pseudo-vision, and now that the SLUH robots have gotten the “vision,” they are more reliable. 

“It will significantly reduce error, perhaps by 100 percent,” said Schlidt. “That’s what all the top teams have been doing.” 

The RoboBills season looks bright, with countless new freshmen taking charge of their own robot, called the KitBot, and leading less experienced freshmen in building it with them. The freshmen who built the KitBot now can lead new members of the club with what they’ve learned from making a robot. 

“There are so many freshmen and a lot of them are very capable,” said Skillman. “Our team is growing and getting better and better every single day.” 

These freshmen are becoming a key part of the club. “They had something they had a lot of fun doing, and now they are engaged and committed to the club,” said Schlidt. “That’s going to be really impactful this season.”

The upcoming robotics season will be very successful for SLUH Robotics. Their recently increased numbers serve as a way to both get more done and have an all around better robot.

“Even though the season has started, we are still recruiting,” said Schlidt. “We want the freshmen who have already been here to take up leadership positions and show you how this club works and get you engaged. We want people here.”