The Klein Bots from Klein, Texas have a mission to create robots for competition and help to create engineers for the future. Around forty students in grades 9-12 and ten mentors are working during the 2015 competition season to build a bot for this year's Recycle Rush contest.
FIRST Robotics is full of strong competitors in Texas and specifically Houston. Team 118 the Robonauts, Team 624 CRyptonite Robotics, and Team 1477 Texas Torque are all frontrunning teams based in Houston. Mentors for the Klein Bots include engineers and professionals from NRG, Baker Huges and Chevron.
After a few recent disappointing seasons the Klein Bots decided that changes were needed. The 2015 team is tight knit with diverse skills and trained hard over the last year in several competition areas.
The plan for the Recycle Rush bot is a simple design that can be tested heavily before competition. This year's goal is a trip to the World Championships in St. Louis.
Several alumni from the Klein Bot team have gone on to major in STEM subjects. Senior Rohan Koripalli says that many students, himself included, would have chosen different career paths if not for the robotics team.
Working with FIRST teaches science and engineering but also leadership, communication, business skills and people skills. For this five year old team all of the benefits of the robotics competition are helping to populate the next generation of engineers.
Robot reveal isn't for a few more weeks and the team is hard at work building and testing. Rohan says that the team likes using pneumatic equipment on their bots because of the simplicity and quickness of the kit components. Previous years' robots have had incredibly intricate laser cut shells highlighting the team number and their sponsors.
Off season focus on improvement also included a renewal of social media efforts. The team's website, facebook, twitter and instagram accounts are all updated and ready to be filled with 2015 information once the competition season gets underway.