The Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School's robotics club, The Trojanators, is in its fourth year and continues to offer students the opportunity to engage in robotics and develop skills in business and engineering. The team is building a robot for a national competition.

CRANBERRY TWP — Students at Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School have spent the last semester designing, constructing and coding a robot to compete with schools across the nation.

The school robotics club, The Trojanators, is in its fourth year and offers students the opportunity to work in robotics and develop skills in business and engineering.

The students will compete in the annual competition staged by FIRST, (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization dedicated to inspiring young people to be technology leaders and innovators.

“It's this giant STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) competition where teams have six weeks to build a robot,” said Matt Esser, founder and mechanical lead of the club. “And they come from all over the world. Last year we competed against teams from China and Canada, and this year we're competing with teams from China and Taiwan and all across the United States.”

These six weeks of build time are intense, with team members spending hundreds of hours in the machine shop, working to build a winning machine.

“We have a team of about 30 students, and we meet here almost every day from the beginning of January to about the end of February, trying to construct a robot,” said Esser, “and we do this using CAD (computer-aided design) design and software development.”

The team builds its robot from the ground up, learning about the many development stages along the way.

“Obviously there's a lot of steps in building a robot,” said Justin Koenig, team member. “You're going to need materials, you're going to need wires to link those up to motors, and you're going to need software people to code the robot, so the motors do what you want when you press the buttons on the controller.”

While the external pieces of the robot are more noticeable to an outside observer, the software team is equally important to making a fully functioning robot able to do its job.“We're the brain,” said Jake Ball, head software engineer. “I coordinate the team that works together to use the computers, take care of the interface between the computer and the robot and tell the robot what the code wants it to do.”The robot is controlled by a driver using a video game controller. It is the software team's job to make the robot respond correctly to the different controls.When the six weeks are over, the team will take its creation on the road to compete with teams around the world.“The challenge this year is to create a robot that is able to pick up these cubes, they're called power cubes,” said Esser.Each round pits robots from two teams against each other, scoring points by placing the cubes in bins.While the competition is fierce, and the teams are competitive, Esser said winning is not The Trojanators' only focus.“A big thing about this team is that it's not just about the robot,” he said. “It's mainly about getting people interested about science and technology.”Also, the group offers members the chance to develop business and communications skills along with the mechanical and software engineering.“Although it is a robotics team, there are lot of other things that go into it, like business aspects, communication skills, presentation skills,” Esser said.“It's a fun time, stressful time. A lot of five-hour days after school from 3 to 8, but it's all worth it in the end when you complete it and it looks good,” said Koenig. “I'm glad I joined and a little sad I didn't do it the first three years.”

Matt Esser is the founder and mechanical lead of the CWNC robotics club, The Trojanators. The club's members have worked since January to design and build a robot from the ground up for a national competition.