Credit to Drew Johnson

The FHN robotics team is starting the season off strong with new equipment and technologies to tackle the latest season of First Tech Challenge, a national-level robotics competition that brings new challenges each year. Engineering teacher Mike Green sponsors the robotics team.

“It’s all about skill and programming, how well you can control the robot,” Green said.

The robotics team has acquired some new robot parts to get the edge over the competition. While skill and programming are an important part of the competition, having more advanced parts can give the team more options for their strategy.

“You learn from previous years and find new parts to use. We upgraded our linear actuators and moved to a belt-drive system that is more efficient,” Green said.

The members of the robotics club are excited for the new parts to experiment with and develop a strategy.

“We’re going to have a great year,” Senior and robotics club member Logan Huffaker said.

Sponsored by Raytheon and Qualcomm, the First Tech Challenge sees two teams of two robots battle to score points for their team on a 12 foot by 12 foot playing field. A new addition for this season involves teams building paper airplanes and launching mechanisms to score bonus points for their team.

“We’ve been cooking up some designs for our airplane, we have to make one that goes a certain distance without going over or we lose the whole bonus,” Huffaker said.

Last year, both the girls and co-ed teams did very well and the team is aiming to go all the way to state this year.

“Robotics is all about gracious professionalism, we want to win, but we also want everyone to have fun,” Green said.