Members of the CyberKnights pose with their overseas partner from Istanbul, Turkey, The two teams have been working together via Skype and joined together at a recent competition.
With an endless stream of balls assaulting the goal, the Southington High School CyberKnights stormed the competition last weekend at the FIRST Tech Valley Regional Event held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
After the qualification round, the locals had battled their way into the top spot and selected Team 20, “the Rocketeers,” from New York and Team 6459, “AG Robotek” from Istanbul, Turkey as their alliance partners.
“The best part of the event was working with the rookie team 6459 AG Robotek from Istanbul, Turkey,” team officials said in a press release.
The two teams have been collaborating via Skype to help prepare the Turkey engineers for their first robotics competition. Southington students even brought new, charged batteries for the Turkish team to use in competition.
“We were proud to select these rookies as our alliance partners and happy to say they won the Rookie All Star Award which qualifies them to compete at championship,” officials said in the release. “The CyberKnights will continue to help them prepare for their championship experience.”
Southington faced their first major challenge of the season with a drive train breakdown of an alliance robot, but the CyberKnight alliance still managed to finish as semifinalists for the day.
The CyberKnights came away with the Excellence in Engineering award for the design of the Knightro robot.
Now, the Southington team will turn its attention to the Hartford district event in two weeks. The team will return to action at Hartford Public High School on April 1-2, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.