Carmel Catholic robotics team to compete at world level
Students from Carmel Catholic High School's varsity robotics team, NYAN (Not Your Average Nerds) Robotics, are advancing to the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship Robotics Tournament, held April 26-29 in St. Louis.
NYAN will compete with 128 teams from the United States and around the world. This large-scale competition comprises four different major events, and is expected to have 65,000 attendees.
Leading up to this, NYAN Robotics made it to the semifinals, and won a coveted Rockwell Collins Innovate Award at the super-regional tournament in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
With their decked out lab, and the input of their coaches, mentors, and local engineers, NYAN members designed and built a custom robot over the course of several months. The robot uses two team-programmed Android mobile phones, as well as an array of metal parts, 3-D printed parts, motors, sensors and XBOX game controllers.
The robot, which is 18 inches tall and 18 inches wide, will represent the team in this year's Velocity Vortex game, an action-packed challenge that sets robots against one another in a test of accuracy, speed and consistency. Besides the many disciplines of engineering required for the season to create the robot and strategize about solving key aspects of the challenge, the team is also responsible for fundraising, accounting/budgeting, procurement, extensive documentation, graphic arts, video production, marketing, sales, management and team building - the real world cloaked in a game.
"Advancing to the World Championship is everything we could have hoped for," said Danny Donahoe, co-founder of NYAN and Carmel Catholic senior. "We are excited to be representing Carmel, and now the United States of America in this competition."
The World Championship tournament is a four-day event, and ends a very long season that began last September, during which students designed and programed sophisticated mechanisms, worked out technical bugs and perfected their robot's mechanical, electrical and software operations, as well as refine their presentation of their team and robot. In order to advance to the FTC World Championship, a team's robot must beat out other robots in qualifying tournaments, or win key qualifying awards. They have to excel at all levels of competition (league, division, state and super-regional), to ultimately qualify to compete at the World Championship, where the top three percent of teams ultimately arrive.
"It's a great opportunity for our team and for our school. We are so grateful for Carmel Catholic's support of NYAN as their varsity robotics team, and we are elated that we are a crucial part of their resolute STEM program," said Kevin Coda, team captain and Carmel Catholic senior.
NYAN Robotics is in its second year of existence and is comprised of freshman through seniors. The team's mission is to not only expand their own STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) skills, but also to spark an interest in robotics and STEM within the community, at their school, and most of all with youth. Their website highlighting all of their activities can be found at nyanrobotics.com.