USM’s FIRST Robotics Team 6823 Earns Accolades

USM’s FIRST Robotics Team 6823 Earns Accolades

USM’s FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) Robotics Team 6823 has received multiple awards based on its performance this season:

  • Infinite Recharge @Home Robot Skills Competition: Third place out of 29 teams in the division (one place shy of an award)
  • Infinite Recharge @Home Judged Awards: Won the Autonomous Award, sponsored by Ford. This award celebrates the team that has demonstrated consistent, reliable, high-performance robot operation during autonomously managed actions. Evaluation is based on the robot’s ability to sense its surroundings, position itself or onboard mechanisms appropriately, and execute tasks.
  • Innovation Challenge: Qualified as semifinalists—of 883 teams that submitted materials for judging, 120 teams were selected as semifinalists.
  • Mackenzie Petersen ’23 was selected as a Dean's List Finalist from the Wisconsin Region. She is one of four students selected from the state of Wisconsin for this award, and is currently in the running for the World Championship Dean's List Winner award. The award is given to current student leaders who have led their teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission while achieving personal technical expertise and accomplishment. The students are nominated by their team members and mentors.

This year’s competition was different from previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each team was able to choose from different challenges, and USM’s team chose to participate in all of the available challenges for the year, which included:

Infinite Recharge @Home: A solo competition using a modified version of USM’s robot that the team built for last year’s competition. They recorded videos of the robot completing various solo competitions and were judged via a video interview.

Innovation Challenge presented by Qualcomm: Teams were asked to identify a problem or opportunity to help people keep, regain, or achieve optimum physical and/or mental health and fitness through active play or movement. The team designed the Roboball, which is accompanied by an app that records data of the user’s movements via sensors in the ball, to encourage young children to spend more time exercising and playing outdoors. The app provides daily tasks as well as individual challenges based on improving the user’s physical or mental health. The user will be able to use the Roboball to complete the challenges and track their progression in interactive game style, tracking their completed games and challenges as they continue to play.

Game Design: A challenge to design a novel FRC robotics game that could be used in a future season.  For the game design challenge, USM’s team created Jurassic Frantic, an original game where an incoming meteor means certain doom for the dinosaurs. Players must save the species by incubating them and moving the eggs into caves. The game includes a unique twist: your robot is allowed to use a warp-zone to move to the other side of the field, allowing it to empty the other team's nest, halting their incubation process. The other alliance can do the same to your robot.

Wisconsin Regional Awards: USM’s team also interviewed remotely for the team Chairman’s awards and for individual Dean’s List awards.

Roboball logo
Image of the Jurassic Frantic game board
Image of the Roboball, which records the user's movements via sensors
Image of the Jurassic Frantic logo, and original game designed by USM's robotics team
Photo of USM FIRST Robotics team 6823 robot