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AggieBots Take Part in National ‘Bot Shot’ Tournament

03/25/2019

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (March 22, 2019) – The first weekend in April will not only culminate college hoops in Minneapolis, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s robotics team could play a different basketball game aimed to spotlight the partnership between agriculture and technology.

Land O’ Lakes will host the Bot Shot event April 7 in Minneapolis. The North Carolina A&T robotics team, AggieBots, has been chosen as an alternate team to participate in a robot game of H-O-R-S-E in the event a finals team cannot compete.

Teams from seven universities, including University of Florida, Iowa State University, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin-Madison and South Dakota State University, competed in the virtual qualifying round of the competition. The four universities participating in the finals will be Minnesota-Twin Cities, Purdue, Wisconsin-Madison and South Dakota State.
In its first year in this competition, the AggieBots team – Quavon McNair, Muhammad Ali, Stephan PierreLouis, Roderick Gray, Jesse Derouin and Kara Bradley, led by faculty advisor Don West – did not make the finals but learned a lot about implementing theoretical knowledge to the real world. 

Engineering and robotics has increasingly become part of day-to-day operations in agriculture and farming. The contest is designed to challenge and celebrate the academic and competitive achievements of students in the field of engineering, robotics and computer science by challenging teams from various schools to design and build their own robot to perform specified basketball tasks. The N.C. A&T team's robot can pull basketballs from a rack, load the balls into the machine, throw the balls, move forward and backward, turn on a zero radius and adjust the angle of the ball for different distances.

Awaiting the winning team will be a $10,000 grand prize and the chance to put their robot to one final test during a shoot around with basketball legend David Robinson.

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