The St. Louis U. High Robotics team, alongside other robotics teams throughout the world, received word of this year’s FIRST robotic challenge last Saturday, and have started to prepare for their competition.

After taking home the championship trophy last fall, the RoboBills streamed the much-anticipated announcement video on Saturday at Wydown Middle along with other robotics teams. 

“We all gathered together with other schools to go watch the big reveal,” said Robotics co-moderator Robyn Wellen. “It was really fun to be able to see the game get revealed with all the other teams there and get thinking on what we could do.”

This year’s robotics competition game is “Charged Up.” Two groups—each containing students from three different high schools—are required to create multiple robots to score points. Charged Up has the players create machines that will place either plastic cones or inflatable cubes on varying heights of a staircase for points; the higher the object is placed, the more points the team receives. The robot has to work autonomously, purely on its coding, for 15 seconds, and then teams have an additional two minutes and fifteen seconds to guide the robot by remote control.

In addition, there is a platform in the middle of the playing field called the “charging station” where robots can balance atop the unstable ground to earn more points. The robots can dock to the station for points during the autonomous portion of the match or before the match reaches its time limit.

The RoboBills are beginning their numerous projects for Charged Up by sharing and exchanging strategies, creating prototypes of possible robots, and drawing up creations in CAD, along with many other endeavors.

“The season is starting up really well because we have a lot of energy and guys are going down to the iLab to start working on some prototypes,” siad co-moderator Craig Hinders. “We are mainly looking to try and build on that same kind of momentum that we have going on right now, so, when the competition comes around, we will still have a great group of guys all working together.”

The competition takes place on March 10 and 11.

“We are all looking forward to the first game this year, especially since it’s more of a team game because one robot design will not be able to do everything we need them to do,” said Wellen. “We’ll just all have to work together to create some great robots and hopefully win the competition.”