ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, Md. — Four Anne Arundel County Schools, Crofton High, South River High, Chesapeake High, and Archbishop Spalding High will compete in a robotics competition this weekend.
The competition will take place at Archbishop Spalding High School on Saturday and Sunday.
It was lunchtime at Crofton High School, but one group of students had more than food on their minds.
They call themselves the Crofton Cybirds, and they're in competition mode for the FIRST Robotics Competition, where 34 teams from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. will compete.
But what's unique about this team is it's completely student-run.
"We have tons of mentors and teachers helping us out with more of the administrative tasks, but when it comes to actually touching and building the robot, it's all students,” said Kaylin Vincent, senior at Crofton High School.
It's set up like a business, with positions of CEO Marc Portaro and COO Kaylin Vincent. They've been part of the team since it started three years ago.
"We were able to join the team when it had two people on it, so we've been part of building the whole team,” said Marc Portaro, a senior at Crofton High School.
Now a team of 18 working together, everyone has their task. In January, the team devised a plan to build the robot, and they've been working on it ever since.
"We have a lot of different, we call them sub-teams, actually building the metal on the robot. We have people doing all the wiring. We have people actually coding, and then we have a design team that came up with the design of our robot,” said Vincent.
Every year, the organization FIRST Robotics releases a challenge. Teams create a robot or design to accomplish goals. This year, they have to shoot an object and hang off a structure.
"Each team is given certain parameters as a height limit, a width limit, and how far you can extend outside your width perimeter. Anything you can imagine, you can build,” said Portaro.
First, rings are scattered flat across the ground.
"Our robot uses grippy rubber wheels in order to pull it into a chamber where we then use flywheels to shoot this ring into a target,” said Portaro.
For the first fifteen seconds, the group programmed the robot to run by itself. Then, the humans joined in.
This robot really does it all, taking on all the challenges of the ring toss and lifting its own weight. Twenty-four teams will make it to the playoffs on Sunday. The Cybirds hope to be one of those 24.
