Brother Rice Robotics Team Headed to NASA for International Competition

The Brother Rice High School robotics team.

Chicago, IL, May 9, 2016 -- The Brother Rice High School robotics team grabbed first place in the MATE Midwest Regional Championship for underwater robotics on April 30. Only in its second year of existence, the Crusaders competed against 11 other high schools and walked away champions.

The team is now qualified for for the international competition at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. The team scored the most points in the pool led by drivers Milo Bradshaw and Patrick Nielsen and tether men Liam Coughlan, CJ Dvorak, and Pat Walsh. The team also had the high score in the engineering presentation with Joe Taylor, Jack McBrearty, and Vince Zampillo adding to the team’s strong showing.

The team is currently in the planning stage for a trip to Houston in late June to compete against about 30 teams from across mainland USA, Hawaii, Canada, China, Scotland, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and Bermuda. The team would like to fly down to Houston with their robot to represent their country and compete against other world class, student designed robots from across the world.

The competition is at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a part of the Johnson Space Center in which astronauts perfect their spacewalks. The competition this year is based on tasks that robots may have to do on distant moons and planets while exploring for life. One such place is Jupiter’s moon named Europa, which is thought to have deep oceans that may contain life.

The team this year is made up of mostly underclassmen, making it one of the youngest teams to compete in the deep end of the pool, also known as the “Ranger” division. Many of these students are aspiring to become engineers to use science and technology to design solutions to solve some of the world’s’ major problems like water quality, pollution, energy shortages, and hunger.

Congratulations to Crusader Robotics team! The young men on the team are learning the basics to becoming the next generation of engineers for our country and world.