[MUSIC]
Bot Shot is a robotics competition
sponsored by Land O'Lakes. Universities
all over the country are gonna be
building robots that the main goal is
to shoot a basket that's the most accurate. The
competition is two parts. The first part
is, there's multiple spots on the court
that the robot has to make shots from in
a certain amount of time: free-throw line,
side of the key, baseline, layup, and then
the three-pointer. And then the second
part is more of a competition where
it'll be like a real game of H-O-R-S-E
basketball between the other robots. At
the end of the competition the winner
will actually get to compete against David
Robinson, famous basketball player, in a
real game. So we'll decide how accurate our
robot really is. My involvement has
mostly been on the hardware and
mechanical side of it, just mostly
building it and like designing. There
were a million things that we could do, but
then we had to decide which one was the
best, which one was the most accurate one.
So we realized we needed more of like an
almost like a stationary shooting
mechanism. It intakes the ball, and then
it rolls all the way down to the feeder,
and then the feeder will put the ball up
and these two, it's a set of wheels on both
sides,
the wheels are attached to a rotating
arm itself. We can control the angle of
the arm and the velocity of the wheels. I
think the hardest part was mostly
making sure everything worked together
in one fluid path. So from the intake to
the feeder to the shooter, just making
sure all that was consistent and also
that it worked with each different
system together.
I'm excited mostly just because I really
like robotics, I'm really passionate about that.
And it's a really interesting
competition for robots to do something,
like play a sport that humans play.
I think that's really cool.
