DarBots robotics teams headed to state
By Tannika King - Faculty
Two of Darlington’s DarBots robotics teams are headed to the state championship next month after a successful performance at their second FIRST Tech Challenge tournament on Feb. 4.
The qualifying event, hosted by Darlington, drew schools from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Northwest Georgia and the Atlanta area. The event itself is part of a much larger international robotics competition, the goal of which is to see which teams can design a robot that plays a game called “Bowled Over.” Click here for more information on the challenge.
After breaking the record high score for Georgia and winning the coveted PTC Design Award for Robot Construction, two teams from Darlington ended up in the final match. With one team in the winning alliance and another team in the runner-up alliance, the DarBots earned two of the four available bids for the championship.
“Every team competes in an alliance; you never compete by yourself,” explained Owen Kinney, robotics instructor. “The individual team that has been in the most winning alliances throughout the day gets to be a captain and choose another team to be in their alliance for the finals. Generally, each team in the winning alliance goes on to state.”
Darlington also placed second in the rankings for the Inspire Award, given to the team with the most impact.
“Community involvement is a major part of the FIRST Robotics program,” Kinney said. “Teams are encouraged to promote robotics and to use their technical expertise to serve their communities. Each of our team members is required to log at least 10 hours of community service; however, they do a lot more than that. For the past two years, our teams hosted FIRST Lego League tournaments for middle school students at Darlington and we are now starting to reach further into our community to promote robotics.”
This year, Kinney’s students have been working with a rookie team from the 100 Black Men of Rome Organization. Recently, Darlington seniors Andrew Safigan, a DarBots alumnus, and Denny Nolan trained the entire team and their coaches on how to use the programming software. The DarBots are also working with Floyd County 4-H on a plan to grow more robotics participation in other local schools.
“We have some exceptional students in terms of skill level when it comes to both engineering and programming,” Kinney said. “It’s really cool because our robotics program is designed for peer learning – we want students to teach the next generation as they move up and that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”
At this year’s FIRST Tech Challenge event at Darlington, Safigan and fellow DarBots alumnus Ted Summer served as software inspectors and assistant referees.
Kinney said his teams will spend the next few weeks improving, refining and tweaking their robots. They may start over completely with some of their robot designs.
“The robots are complex in that they handle several different tasks,” he explained. “You have to program the robot for 30 seconds of autonomous movement and two minutes of remote controlled movement. Some of our mechanics could use some work and our programming for the autonomous portion of the challenge needs a little bit of help. We’ll be ready, though.”
The FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship will be held March 2-3 at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Ga. Students who will be taking part in this competition are: Oreofe Aderibigbe, Shakeem Albouy, Maria Barragan, Erik Griffiths, Tim Huang, Wesley Kuo, Dent Law, Denny Nolan, Yves Reimann, Steven Shi, Stevenson Walker, Cherry Xiao, Charlie Xu, Andrew Yuan, Du Zhang and Haorui Zhu.
“If we win at state, which I hope we will, then we would have the opportunity to compete at the FIRST World Championships in St. Louis,” Kinney said.
