Sixty-five teams from across the state met at the Retriever Activity Center at UMBC on Saturday to compete in the FIRST Lego League state championship.
Founded by innovator Dean Kamen - inventor of the Segway and other technologies - FIRST seeks to inspire and encourage children to participate in science and technology.
Starting with a standardized Lego Robotics kit, each team is given eight weeks to design and develop a robot able to autonomously complete a specific set of tasks. For this year's competition, the tasks mimicked biomedical interventions, such as blood screening, patching a defective heart, dispensing medication. A dozen complicated tasks had to be completed in 2.5 minutes.
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On the second floor of the RAC, groups showed off their favorite homebrew robotics projects, including sumo wrestling robots, a robot that solves Rubic's cube, and mechanical insects.
Robotics is all fun and games unless your name is Sarah Connor.
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