The Utica Community Schools ThunderChickens FIRST Robotics team, Team 217, are state champs and bound to an international tournament they have captured three times in its history.
The UCS team on Saturday won the Michigan State Championship along with their alliance partners Wayland Wildcats (Team 6090) from Wayland, MI, and Metal Muscle (Team 1506) from Flint, MI.
Together, the three-team alliance won the Ford Division Championship, and then went on to become the overall State Champions! The competition was held April 6-8 at Saginaw Valley State University.
“Being able to take a simple 3 minute delivery game and turn it into a heart-racing experience is what the competition gave us and what I enjoyed at States,” said ThunderChickens student CEO senior Aidan Petras. “Seeing the excitement and energy in the stands really said it all. The most fun I had was seeing every dedicated peer on our team have the wild mix of emotions the competition brought us, and I think that experience will never be forgotten by anyone on the team.”
The ThunderChickens robotics team is made up of 34 students from all four UCS high schools, the Center for Science and Industry, the Stevenson Center for Manufacturing, Automation and Design Engineering and the Utica Center for Math, Science and Technology program.
The FIRST Robotics season kicked off on January 7th with the 2023 game reveal, after which the students worked together to design a robot to compete in this year’s game. The team planned their build season around a 45-day calendar.
In just 45 days, the team went from concept to a finished robot design, throughout which they had to brainstorm ideas, test them through a rapid concept selection process, validate them by building a prototype, modeling the design in CAD using SolidWorks, build the electrical control system, and write the software to control the systems.
The ThunderChickens will now advance to the World Championship in Houston, Texas, April 19-22. The ThunderChickens are three-time world champions.
“Being at states, let alone on the field side was both exciting and nerve-wracking. There’s always an uncertainty about the match ahead, but each time, we walk in confidently,” said drive team member Brendan Schwartz. “Yet regardless of the nerves, being able to see the last few months come to fruition on the field, let alone culminating in winning the event - it’s an amazing experience and a feeling comparable only to being on top of the world.“
FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an international organization dedicated to spreading engineering and robotics.
Teams build 120-pound robots to compete in a new game each year. Combining the excitement of sport with the rigors of science and technology, FIRST Robotics Competition is called "the ultimate sport for the mind" and "the hardest fun you’ll ever have."
Under strict rules, limited resources, and an intense six-week time limit, teams of students are challenged to build and program robots to play a difficult field game against and with competitors, as well as raise funds and work well with the rest of their team.
The 2023 FIRST Robotics game is called CHARGED UP. In CHARGED UP, two competing alliances of three robots each process game pieces by moving them from substations and scoring in the grid.
There are two different game pieces this season and are best described as safety cones and inflatable cubes. Human players provide the game pieces to the robots from the substations and the robots have to move them across the field quickly and place them strategically with their alliance partners to fill the scoring grid.
In the final moments of each match, alliance robots race to dock or engage with their charge station, which is a teetering platform on which as many robots from the alliance attempt to balance together before the round ends.
Each match begins with a 15-second autonomous period, during which time alliance robots operate only on pre-programmed instructions to score points. In the final 2 minutes and 15 seconds of the match, drivers take control of the robots and score points by continuing to retrieve and score their game pieces onto the grid and docking on or engaging with their charge station.
The alliance with the highest score at the end of the match wins.
