Samanta Duarte and Maicon Albuquerque are part of the team that won the Australian leg
Two Electrical Engineering students from PUCRS’ School of Engineering (Feng) have joined the first robotics team of Brazil to win the Australian leg of For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (First), the world’s biggest educational robotics event. Maicon Albuquerque and Samanta Duarte, members of The Brazilian Trail Blazers 1772, will be joining Champship, the event’s final stage, which brings together the winning robots from the tournament’s regional legs from countries such as Australia, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Israel and China. This year, the finals will be held in Houston, Texas, from Apr 19-22.
At the initial stage of the regional legs of First, all teams will be competing with one another and a rank order list will be created. In Australia, The Brazilian Trail Blazers 1772 remained unbeatable at that stage. Eight alliances, each of which with three teams, will be formed, depending on the teams’ positions in the list. Then, all alliances will be competing against one another and the last one remaining will be the winner. The Brazilian alliance included two Australian teams that have won their regional legs. This non-profit competition will confer trophies and medals upon the winners. In addition to winning the competition, the Brazilian team won the award Industrial Design Award, sponsored by General Motors.
Every year, a new game is created by First and the teams from all over the world have to design a different robot. The game is launched on the second weekend of the year and, after that, the teams have six weeks to design a robot and send it to the regional leg. 2017’s game is called Steamworks and is about feeding a space shuttle called Airship. The top-scoring team will be the one that makes it take off.
The Brazilian Trail Blazers 1772 was created in 2005 to encourage students from public schools of Gravataí to expand their horizons in the areas of science and technology by doing theoretical and practical work. The program prepares the youth to work with technology. The Brazilian team, which is sponsored by General Motors, Novelis and the International Association of Technological Development (Aidtec), joins First every year.
