AUSTIN, Texas -- It's a Texas roundup of a different sort. Teams of students from all around the state are pitting their robots against one another at the 2011 Texas Robot Roundup.
The high school students have been working for six weeks building their mechanical friends. Anderson High sophomore Moritz Freid said it's a good challenge.
"It was a really invigorating thing because it's a really constrained amount of time to build something like a big robot for a certain competition," he explained.
Junior Allison Rich entered a robot with her team from the Girl Scouts of Central Texas.
"We're one of two Girl Scout teams in the nation," said Rich. "There's a team out in California, and there are very few all-girls teams, and so it's really awesome to know that girls can actually do this."
Daniel Aviles is a sophomore at Eastside Memorial High. His team did something unique, building a wearable control console for their robot. He said it eliminates loose wires.
"Right here is the driver's station, right here is the laptop, right here is the joystick to control the mechanism - the arm, the joystick to control the chassis and the minibot deployer," said Aviles, pointing to each control on the console.
A wide variety of students participated in this artificial intelligence competition.
"In reality, we have people from so many different backgrounds," explained Anderson High junior Issac Kravitz. "We have people who are in sports; we had a person on the varsity football team come and help us out.”
Remember, the engineers of the future are being born at the Texas Robot Roundup. The final competition takes place Saturday at Anderson High School from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
