While the late-season snows forced cancellation of the planned open house at Becker High School Tuesday afternoon, the Becker Robotics Team continued working on their new competition robot regardless of the weather.
Coach Alex Jurek said that the open house will be re-scheduled, but not before the team travels to Minneapolis for the First Robotics® regional competition.
The three-day event begins Friday (March 27) in the Mariucci Arena on the U. of M. campus.
The Tuesday work session focused on refining the catapult mechanism on the 2014 competition robot, which will need to fire a large air-filled exercise ball into a goal to score points in the up-coming competition. Team members Ryan Swanson, brothers Brenten and Grayden Schlangen, Emma Schreifels and Sydney Mastey practiced reloading the catapult, and they later staged an impromptu demonstration with the robot catapult tossing the ball our through an doorway and out into the parking lot.
The catapult is powered by compressed bands of surgical tubing at the moment, Swanson revealed, but he expects the picture will change after new materials arrive later this week. The team is expecting delivery of a number of rubber tubes of the kind used to power underwater spear guns, which will add power and reliability to the firing mechanism, which is under considerable stress during the launching process.
