After hearing about the GearCats’ success at the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) District Championship, students are wondering who the GearCats are and what they do. The Millbrook Robotics Team (FRC Team 6500) is a club that aims to promote the knowledge of emerging technology and offer a community for students to use their STEM skills outside of the classroom.

  Over the weekend of March 11th to the 13th, the GearCats attended the FRC District Championship at East Carolina University where they competed against 32 other teams from across the state. The competition is organized into a bracket of qualifying, quarter-final, semi-final, and final rounds. Team 6500 played in 20 matches total, with a record of 15-5 overall. The GearCats returned home with the honor of being a District Event Finalist and receiving the Industrial Design Award sponsored by General Motors.

  The GearCats, consisting of about 30 active members, work together to build a functioning robot under the mentorship of adults from the engineering industry and Millbrook faculty. The robotics team is organized into six sub-teams with different responsibilities: Marketing, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Mechanical (build the robot), Electrical (wire the robot), Programming (code the robot), and Game Strategy (drive the robot). Senior Colin Reinhardt details the role of the CAD Team: “We design what we want to accomplish tasks like picking up the ball or how we should carry the ball up to the shooter. We take those models and build them in a computer-aided design program that gives official blueprints for Mechanical to follow.” All of these sub-teams play an integral part in engineering their robot, named George, which has an intake system that launches balls into the air through a set of spinning rollers.

  During a match, teams have two and a half minutes to earn as many points as they can. Robots score cargo points by successfully shooting balls into the center hub of the robotics field and hangar points by climbing. Senior Diego Gonzalez, the Drive Team Captain, explains, “The final component of the game is a climbing component where there are four bars at different heights. Each bar your robot is able to reach is a different amount of points, and we have a climbing mechanism that can reach the highest bar. This is only done by a fraction of teams in the state and our consistency in climbing led to our success.”

  In the qualifying round, Team 6500 had a record of 12-2 and ranked first out of 33 teams. In the final round, the GearCats won one match and lost two matches by just one point, falling short of a victory, but still finishing in second place. When asked what the team hopes to improve after this competition, sophomore Monica Quan, Mechanical sub-team member, states, “It was pretty successful, but we could have done a little bit better. Our shooter broke and one of the things disconnected on the climber, so we have had to change that up a little bit and redo some of the parts that got broken.”

  Each robotics season, there are a total of four regional events, and each FRC team plays in two events. Team 6500 earned 58 district points, which is based on their performance in the qualifying round, playoffs, and alliances formed during the competition. Moving forward, Vice President Trevor Petzold states, “I wish to improve our communication for the rest of the season. I also hope to improve our team spirit next competition with new competition vests.” If you are interested in supporting the GearCats in preparation for states and possibly worlds, check out this fundraiser!