CAMBRIDGE, MASS. (WHDH) - After a three-year absence, the battle of the bots is back at MIT.
Thirty-two mechanical engineering students gathered in Cambridge Thursday for the university’s annual Robot Competition, which was not held in-person for the past several years due to the pandemic.
Students put their robots to the test on a specially designed game board, equipped with many challenges for the robots to overcome.
“They can move balls from one place to another, they can hit buttons, they can pull a cord to raise a weight for a multiplier, they can tip a street post for points,” Amos Winter, the Associate Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT said.
The students spent the whole semester, each preparing their own robot for the competition and the pressure was on.
Arianna Ilvonen confessed to being nervous when asked how she was feeling about the competition. “It’s kind of scary having like this whole semester leading up to like one match and then you’re just kind of done,” she said.
But that same pressure made for a thrilling competition, said junior Joshua Rohrbaugh.
“The atmosphere is absolutely electric,” Rohrbaugh said. “It’s really amazing we can celebrate this kind of academic competition in this kind of way. [It’s] almost like a sporting event and that gets me hyped up.”
(Copyright (c) 2024 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)