Buckets Georg (gōrg): The unlikely name of a Skyline athlete. Only, this isn’t a student athlete. Buckets is a student made athlete, and on April 9, Buckets and his talented robotics team placed 13th in the state, qualifying them for the Robotics World Championship.
After only six weeks of what is referred to as the “Build Season,” Buckets Georg came to life. There are five different sub-teams that come together to make all of this happen. “First the design team comes up with concepts. Then they make models and drawings of those concepts. They reiterate if needed and pass the finished designs to the Fabrication team to inspect and build,” Said Fabrication Lead Senior Rowan Kerns. An electrical team handles all things that relate to wiring, while the programming team focuses on the code that will run the robot. Lastly, a media team negotiates sponsorships and designs cool robotics merch.
Buckets Georg by: Rowan Kerns
Every year, a new game is selected for the constructed robots to compete in. This year, the game consisted of three parts: Auton, Teleop, and endgame. For Auton and Teleop, the goal is the same: throw large tennis balls through a designated hoop or ‘hub’. One hub is higher than the other which makes it worth more points. The catch is, during the Auton segment of the competition, no one is allowed to control the robot. It must function on prayers and code alone. The endgame segment consists of the robots moving to the hangar zone and climbing rungs, which Design Lead Senior Dennis Serbin describes as “similar to monkey bars.”
After out-competing over 400 teams in Michigan, Buckets and his team traveled to Huston, Texas, to compete in the world championships on April 20-23. Leads Serbin and Kerns both expressed their confidence going into the competition. “Regionals went better than expected,” said Serbin. “We want to keep everything the same, since we were already scoring a lot,” He replied when asked about the team’s game plan.
Kerns commented, “There is going to be some crazy competitiveness in our division, but I think we have the skills to do pretty well.”
After three days of competition, the Skyline Robotics team placed 13th in their division, and even made it to quarter finals. Now, they return home with their blue banners and pride. The Skyline Robotics team has put in hard work and long hours this year and it has paid off. All we can do now is congratulate them on their accomplishments and support them in years to come.
