Maine students part of team advancing to world robotics competition

Bangor Daily News

Posted March 04, 2013, at 6:27 p.m.

The FIRST Robotics Competition Granite State Regional tournament was held this past weekend at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, N.H. A FIRST robotics team from Portland was part of the winning alliance and has advanced to the FIRST World Championship competition in St. Louis.

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams are made up of high school students and adult mentors, and each year they design, build and program a robot designed to play a game which changes from year to year.

This year’s challenge is “Ultimate Ascent” where robots need to hurl frisbees into goals and climb a pyramid made of iron pipe. During a match, six teams compete at once on two “alliances.” Team 3609 Duct Tape Dragons were part of the winning alliance this year which included a team from Toronto and a team from Massena, N.Y. They were the only New England team on the winning alliance.

Team 3609 Duct Tape Dragons are a team based at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Southern Maine, and all of the members come from different schools and different backgrounds. The average FRC team has around 25 students, and a robot can cost up to $4,000 to build. Team 3609 Duct Tape Dragons has just six students and five adult mentors, and their 120-lb robot was made mostly with materials scavenged from their robots from previous years. Their total cost for the robot was $495, which includes the value of the recycled parts.

They received tremendous support and assistance from other Maine teams, including Team 172 The Northern Force out of Falmouth & Gorham High Schools, Team 133 BERT from Bonney Eagle High School and Team 58 Riot Crew from South Portland High School.

Team 3609 also won the Imagery Award for outstanding team identity, as you can see with the blue and orange duct tape theme in their photo. Team sponsors were Fairchild Semiconductor, jcpenney, Southern Maine Community College and Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maine.

They were truly an underdog in the competition, and they were selected after qualification rounds by the top seeded team (Team 610 Coyotes from Toronto, Canada), which had an unstoppable frisbee-shooting robot. They defeated Team 133 in the semi-finals and Team 172 in the finals, and now get a chance to compete at the FIRST World Championships. This will take place at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis from April 24-27.

The Duct Tape Dragons faced incredible odds to get this far, but they will have to take on the tremendous task of raising more than $10,000 for the team to attend the FIRST World Championship. They will get one more chance to compete before then, at the inaugural Pine Tree Regional competition taking place April 4-6, at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee in Lewiston. All FIRST competitions are open to the public and free to attend.

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