ESCANABA — Last week, the Escanaba RoboMos of Escanaba Junior/Senior High School hosted the FIRST in Michigan Escanaba District Event at Escanaba Jr/Sr High School, April 9-11.

The event started with qualifier matches, where the RoboMos placed high enough to become an alliance captain for the playoff matches. They competed alongside alliance partners the Binary Cows and Chassell Copper Country Cats, teams 10589 and 9249, placing fourth in the competition overall.

This placement gave the RoboMos enough ranking points to make it to the FIRST in Michigan State Championship at Saginaw Valley State University this weekend, April 16-18.

The RoboMos also won an award at the Escanaba event. It was the The Industrial Design Award, which celebrates the team that demonstrates industrial design principles, striking a balance between form, function, and aesthetics. The judges picked their robot because of its use of industrial parts, its strength, and its spindexer design. The spindexer is a sort of rotating wheel that grips six inch yellow balls — this year’s game piece — and spins them around into the robot’s shooter. The shooter design is a heavy flywheel that flings the balls or “fuel” into the air.

The RoboMos faced a few challenges throughout the competition. There had been errors in the thousands of lines of code that run the robot, causing it to function incorrectly. Another challenge faced was when their robot’s intake got slammed with a great amount of force, causing it to break. The RoboMos were able to solve these issues and continued to perform well through the end of the competition.

This year’s FIRST Robotics Competition was themed after archaeology. The game is played on a single field, where six teams are split into two sides to compete — red vs blue. During a match, game pieces — or “fuel” — are arranged in the middle of the field for teams to compete to collect and score in an elevated box. Each side has their own box — or “hub” — to score in.

There are two ways to obtain fuel. One way is to intake them from the ground. The second way is to have them dumped into your robot from the human player, which is a person that is allowed to move fuel from outside the field into the field. The team with more points at the end of the timed match wins!

There is also a portion in the beginning of the match called the autonomous period where the robot completely runs through code and it picks up the fuel, but otherwise the robot is driven for the rest of the match by some of the team members, using joysticks or controllers, and a laptop.

Both the RoboMos and Gladstone’s Bravebots will be competing at the FIM State Championship. This event can be watched online by looking up the competition on the firstinspires.org events page, or by visiting the FIRSTinMichigan youtube channel during the event.