On Saturday Jan. 7th, our Thorbots team watched the kickoff live stream together as they revealed the game for this year: Charged Up! The game simplified: the robot has to be able to pick up inflated cubes and put those on shelves, and pick up cones and set those on pegs. Additionally, the robot has to be able to balance on a teetering four-by-eight platform.

After deciding as a whole team how they would approach this season’s challenge, the members split into their sections to divide and conquer. The build team (along with select programmers) has been putting in the hours working on a mock field so we can test our robot, as well as different grabbing-mechanisms.

The marketing team has spent the majority of their time working on this season’s T-Shirt design and continuing to produce a newsletter to update sponsors and other supporters of their hard work. They continually update the robotics website which can be found at: https://sites.google.com/westby-norse.org/thorbots5903/home