The Mount Baker Robotics Club has returned from representing B.C. at the national skills competition in Vancouver with a bronze medal.
The club, made up of Landon Harvey, Edmond Yoo and Derek Johnson, competed from June 5 to 8, after placing first in robotics in the Skills B.C. competition.
The national skills competition took place at B.C. Place Stadium, pitting the club against eight other teams from provinces and territories across Canada, including Ontario, Saskatchewan and Nunavut.
“We competed there for two days, eight hours each day,” Landon Harvey said. “I think it was very stressful for us.”
That stress came as a result of competitive pressure.
“Seeing all the other robots and how good they were compared to the provincials ... there was some really good competition down there and we were really happy we could go,” he said.
The team ended up pulling off the bronze medal win, which he said was so close, it could have gone either way.
The competition was to build a robot that could complete a specific action, which in this case was retrieving a pallet and stacking it on a shelf.
“In September, we had a scope document. It was about 24 pages long and it told us all the rules and regulations of the game that we had to do,” Harvey explained. “We had to build a robot on that document. We built this robot and what it could do was go over obstacles like teeter-toters and stairs. We had to pick up these little wooden pallets and bring them over the obstacles and put them in a shelving unit. Meanwhile, there would be another robot in the same arena doing the same tasks on the opposite side of the shelves, knocking ours out, back and forth.”
The team from Ontario took gold and Saskatchewan took silver.
“It was really neat to go there and see all these other designs and stuff that we would never think of doing and seeing it done properly. Some of it worked really well,” Harvey said, adding that some of the designs were similar to their forklift idea and some were very different. “For instance their robot would lock the pallet in place to transport, while other robots would grab on with little rollers and other interesting contraptions.”
The team took home $10,000 in Stanley tools for the school as well as the bronze medal.
All three members are graduating this year.