Junior Harrison Young sketches his ideas for the 2014 robot.
Sophomore team member Christian Gavalchin poses with the FIRST Robotics 2014 game piece.
Team members meet to discuss this season’s challenge and brainstorm ideas for the robot. Pictured are Jim Harris, Christian Gavalchin, Uddhav Joglekar, Josh Falk, Samantha Young, Matthew Mazalewski, Mitaali Taskar, Michelle Singh, Jenna Mollica, Harrison Young, Mehaa Gupta, James Aikins and Parth Mandrekar.
Robbinsville High School FIRST Robotics team, Nemesis, joined other teams at Montgomery High School to kick off the new season on Jan. 4.
Teams from Hamilton, Allentown, Ewing, Hightstown and Bridgewater gathered to watch FIRST founder Dean Kamen reveal this year’s challenge live from Southern New Hampshire University on a NASA-TV webcast. More than 2,700 teams around the world watched the broadcast.
This season, students will compete in the Aerial Assist. During competition, teams of three robots will attempt to pass, catch and shoot large balls across an arena into six-foot high goals. Teams will consist of three randomly selected alliances.
Each team has six weeks to design and build their robot for the Aerial Assist.
Nemesis chief technical officer, Julia Borowski was enthused with the challenge.
“We are prototyping in Autodesk Inventor, our Computer Aided Design software, to design, test and simulate our various components before we machine and assemble our competition robot.” Borowski said in a statement, “I am looking forward to my final competition season and preparing our underclassmen for years to come.”
During the kick-off event, Nemesis team members also participated in workshops on pneumatics, gearboxes, and judging criteria for the Chairman’s Award, the competition’s highest honor.
Later, they returned to the RHS Technology Lab to begin designing their robot.
More information is online at frc2590.org.
