Celt-X’s hard work pays off

BY MADELINE COLEMAN, GRADE 10 AND OLIVIA VIEIRA, GRADE 12

Celt-X Team 5406 is the robotics team at Bishop Ryan Catholic Secondary School. Our team is part of an organization called FIRST. Every year, over 3000 teams from around the world participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition and for the past three years, we have earned a spot at the World Championships. Every year a new game is released that requires us to analyze the rules, devise a strategy, and to design and build a new robot. This challenge pushes us to think creatively, since we must design a robot for a game that nobody has ever played before. This year, our robot was named Oscar and we had just six weeks to build it. Oscar is 119 lbs, can move 20 feet/second, pick up objects from the floor and put them on pegs, shoot balls using vision tracking, and climb a rope. The team’s hard work showed throughout our competition season. We won the Georgian College event, were finalists at the McMaster event, and qualified for the World Championships where we seeded 7th in our division. During the competition season we received many prestigious awards: Engineering Inspiration, Industrial Design, Gracious Professionalism, and the Judges Award. The success at these competitions would not be possible without our amazing sponsors. Recently, we received a $69 000 grant from the Heritage Green Trust. Their generous funding will allow our team to purchase state of the art metalworking machines such as a CNC mill and router and a 3D printer. These machines will allow us to create more complex parts to our specifications and allow us to remain competitive with some of the best teams in the world. Celt-X had an amazing year and with the support of the Heritage Green Trust, we look forward to building on our successes.