Martin Engineering — a global materials handling company headquartered in Neponset, Illinois — is sponsoring two teams of Illinois high school students in a national robotics competition.
For the second consecutive year, the company will sponsor teams from Kewanee and Peoria in the FIRST Robotics Competitions, an annual robotics engineering contest created by Dean Kamen — the inventor of the Segway scooter — in 1989. FIRST is an acronym for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”.
For the Kewannee team, Martin provided a professional engineer to serve as a mentor to the students. It also assisted in the construction of a 1:1 scale “playing field for testing the team’s robot, which is similar to the actual surface where the competition will take place.
Martin also is sponsoring the Peoria team, nicknamed “Team Icarus”, which in the past has won the 2012 Boilermaker Regional and earned the Engineering Inspiration Award at the 2013 Crossroads Regional and the Engineering Excellence Award at the 2014 Wisconsin Regional, among other hardware.
John Nogaj, a member of Team Icarus, said competing in robotics competitions has taught him a lot, even outside robotics engineering.
“The competitions are specifically set up to encourage teamwork and interaction between people and groups with different strengths,” Nogaj said in a news release. “Every team’s objective is the same: Engineering and building a robot to perform specific tasks for each competition. We get just six weeks to complete our designs, which must be built from a common kit of parts supplied by FIRST.”