Brighton High School Robotics Team Shoots For a Win

The Robotics Team - Brighton's United Geeks (BUG) - will compete in the FIRST Robotics Competition Rebound Rumble in Northville all day Friday and Saturday.

Brighton is still a new team - it's rookie season was 2011, where they earned two awards: Rookie Inspiration award and Highest Rookie Seed Award.

This season, the team has spent six weeks building a basketball hoops shooting robot. The goal is to have the robot score as many baskets as possible during matches against other teams in two minutes and 15 seconds.

Robots aim at four hoops; the higher the hoop, the greater the score if the ball goes in. A match ends with robots balancing on teeter-totters in the middle of a field.

Katelyn Dunaski, the team's Business Director, said BUG has been working with the Maltby Tech Club to design and name the robot.

"Our team voted and choose a winning drawing, so Dennis is now our robot's name," she said. "The next time they (Maltby Tech Club) visited, they they were able to come to the high school and expierence our building enviorment first hand. During the last visit, we took the robot to them and show them the finished product. With the warm weather, we were able to take it outside and let kids line up and feed the ball into the robot."

Dunaski said the season up to this point has been pretty successful.

So far, they have managed to get eight community sponsors: , , PTO, Brighton Optimist Club, Pizza Island, , , and .

FIRST Robotics is an international organization that helps students aspiring to be future engineers and pioneers in science, technology and more. There are over 2,000 high school FIRST Robotics teams worldwide and approximately $15 million in college scholarships are awarded annually according to the FIRST website, usfirst.org.

BUG will compete again March 29-31 in Livonia.