A team from West Hartford’s Smith STEM entered a robot in the Trinity College International Robot Contest on April 1-2, 2017, and won several awards.

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Trinity College hosts an annual robotics competition – involving teams from universities, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. The contest, which started small in 1994, now includes 125 teams that come from as close as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and as far away as Israel, Indonesia, the United Arab Republic, China, Portugal, and Russia.

This year a team from Smith STEM School entered the “Fire Fighting Home Robot” challenge, which according to the event’s website requires a robot to: “navigate a model home in search of a fire, represented by a burning candle, and then works to extinguish it.”

The robots have to be designed, constructed and programmed by the students. They have to travel through a maze, avoid a soft toy dog, but find a candle and extinguish it. Each attempt is timed. The teams are then judged on a tough electronics and robotics exam, and the creativity, speed and accuracy of their robots.

The Smith STEM robot Smokey 2.0 took home several prizes, including first place for having the lowest possible score in the “Firefighting, Customized” category. The team came in second in the “Best Robot in Division: Firefighting Junior Division, Customized” category, and earned an IEEE Connecticut Award.

Israeli student showing a West Hartford family how his robot works. Photo courtesy of Erica Bloch