The folks at Brimley High School will be the first to admit that a lot can happen in about a month’s time.
Between March and April, the school’s FIRST Robotics team – the Deceivers – went from desperate straits to the top of the world.
The acronym in FIRST Robotics stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.”
Through competitive matches at district, state, national and international levels, FIRST uses robotics to encourage students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The effort is underwritten through school fundraisers, team registration, as well as corporate and private donations.
Every year teams brainstorm, design, and build a fully functional wheeled robot the size of a goat that can accomplish assigned tasks based on a theme unveiled earlier in the year.
This year’s theme, “Rapid React,” saw robots shooting “cargo” balls into “hub” areas for points and then climbing 5- to 8-foot-high uneven bars in each corner of a 27- by 54-foot playing field.
The competition season for Brimley began with two matches held in March and hosted over two weekends in Escanaba and Kingsford.
Escanaba – March 16-18 -- was trial by misfire.
“We didn’t think we would go too far after Escanaba,” said team member Abby Hoffman. “Our limelight wasn’t working, along with our swerve.”
Limelight is a machine-vision system that verifies everything from where the robot is, to how many rubber balls are sunk in a hoop and then collected. The “Swerve” system tracks independently driven wheels that work in concert with one another to move the robot through competition.
“Those were the main problems, but basically the whole robot didn’t work,” said Hoffmann.
Without reliable tools for vision and accurate locomotion, the Escanaba meet saw Brimley finish fourth from the bottom out of a field of 40 teams.
The team and its mentors regrouped and huddled over their creation during the following week and got things moving better. It was a good investment; the Deceivers took first place in Kingsford.
The machine and its humans purred into state finals in Saginaw April 13-16, where the Deceivers notched the honor of representing Michigan in the FIRST world championships, dubbed The Worlds, hosted in Houston, Tex., April 20-23.
Out of 3,225 teams from all over the world that started the FIRST season in January, only 360 went to Houston and the Brimley Deceivers were one of them. In the space of just over four short weeks, the Deceivers went from dead in the water to one of the world’s top teams.
And the team held its own. They were chosen as fourth by the Seventh Alliance, a grouping of teams that adds a factor of external cooperation to competition. The Deceivers also finished 22 out of 60 in their division, a reflection of intrinsic strengths.
“Our goal next year is to not only go to Worlds but to place higher in our division,” said Cole Brehn, who -- along with Derek Postma and Philip Brown -- is a team mentor and a Deceiver alum.
In a way, this year’s competition was the one they never had. The three, who were seniors at the time, were ready to go to the 2020 world finals in Detroit before the pandemic shut everything down. Commencement that year was even online.
Two years later, Brehn and Postma are currently electrical engineering students with a robotics concentration at Lake State. Brown starts mechanical engineering at LSSU this fall.
They plan to roll whatever they learn as student engineers into their alma mater as mentors.
As the saying goes, what goes around does indeed come back.
