The green pit, about the size of a small room, was divided up like a soccer court. On either side of the center line were two model drawbridges, about eight feet high. Two model castles stood where soccer goals would be, vulnerable to the “boulders” on the pit’s floor because of their large turret windows.

Three robots, each about the size of a card table, surrounded one castle. As two students on either side of the pit fiddled with the joysticks on their remotes, the robots launched grey “boulders” (that looked a lot like foam dodgeballs) through the turret window and into the castle. After five were successfully launched, the castle’s flag went down.

The Robotics Competition was officially over.  

The competition was held in Kansas City’s Metropolitan Community College on March 10. Manhattan High’s first-year Robotics Club did not place at the event, which was attended by 59 teams and scored by how well robots crossed defenses and scored goals. However, it did win the “Most Inspirational Rookie Team” award.

Team members waited with their robots before competing in the pit.

“Everyone had their little eight-foot by 10-foot space set up,” senior John Benfer said. “There were different aisles you could walk down to look at all the robots and talk to people.”

Six teams were called to compete in one pit at a time. They were divided into two allied groups of three, and one or two members from each team, depending on its size, were randomly assigned to control their team’s robot.  

Robots competed in two different events: autonomous mode and teleoperated mode.

“In the autonomous mode (which lasted for fifteen seconds), robots had to run and complete tasks on their own,” Junior Nolan Blankenau said. “In the teleoperated mode, which was two to two and a half minutes long, … robots could be driven by joysticks by players just off the field.”

Teleoperated mode consisted of several different obstacles.

“There were five different defenses we had to go over,” senior Bryan Armbrust said. “We had a rock-type terrain and then we also had like a drawbridge and a gate thing that we could open, and then, to also get points, we could shoot a boulder which was like a dodgeball into a tower … There was a lower area that we could also shoot the boulders into, and then we could also scale the tower where we had a robotic arm reach up and grab the bar that was on the tower and pull itself up, which is something only a few were able to do.”

To prepare for the competition, Manhattan High’s Robotics Club stayed after school until about eight p.m., two or three days a week, for six weeks.

“We had a six week build season where we initially watched a video about what the course would be and what objectives we had to overcome with our robot,” Benfer said. “Then we got materials and then over the six-week period we just tried to engineer and build the robot to accomplish the tasks that we wanted it to for the course.”