PEORIA, Ill. – Warriors made of steel and wires will battle at Bradley University’s Renaissance Coliseum this weekend.
The university is hosting the FIRST Robotics Central Illinois Regional Competition through Saturday. The event has been ran since 2014.
The event features 32 high school teams from the Peoria-area and across the Midwest. The teams have spent the past two months building robots to compete at the event.
“The whole point of this is to get kids excited about what they’re doing. And there’s nothing quite like designing and making something that’s your own baby, your own creation, that you could show off and see how it performs in an event like this,” says Caterpillar STEM Project Manager Tim Koch.
Koch says the skills the robots must perform in the competition change each year. This year, the teams will have their robots move objects across the floor to be placed on shelves. The robots will then have to be balanced on a teeter-totter.
Koch adds that skills learned in the competition could have a lasting effect on students, and open the possibility to a career to them.
“Caterpillar and Tesla and all these companies that are doing electric vehicles and automation of vehicles, and being able to connect to the vehicles to the internet or Bluetooth, it’s really just a scaled up version of what these students are doing with these robots,” Koch said.
The competition is free to attend, and runs through Saturday.
