ETSU hosted the Robotics Drone League (RDL) Championship Jan. 27 in the Basler Center for Physical Activity. The competition lasted from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and consisted of two age groups and a total of 27 schools between both.

“The RDL was started to help inspire and teach students about the applied field of robotics and STEM,” stated Dennis Courtney, CEO of STREAMWORKS Education, the nonprofit organization that brought forth the RDL.

Two age groups compete in the RDL that cover the full K-12 range of students. The middle and high schoolers participate in the full competition with 21 different schools in this group while the first through fifth graders compete in the Junior League with six schools participating, but before they could even take on any challenges these young students built their robots and drones on their own.

Photo of West High School students at the Robotic Drone League. (Elaina Gilliam/East Tennessean)

Lead judge of the championship, Jennifer Feathers, said, “This is entirely student-driven, from the building to the operating of the robots, the students are the ones who are hands-on,” With only limited help from mentors, students as young as six or seven build their robots and drones and then pilot them through a series of tasks.

Each year STREAMWORKS Education partners with a different group to come up with new and unique challenges for their middle and high school students. This year it was BioBuilder Educational Foundation, another nonprofit organization that focuses on getting students into STEM fields but rather than a focus on robotics, they focus on bioengineering.

“This year, alongside BioBuilder we created the Scarecrow as our challenge. We aimed to show how robotics and bioengineering can be used together in this competition,” said Courtney. Students were required to build robots and drones to help complete tasks such as finding and removing diseased corn, helping plant new resistant strains of corn, repairing broken pipes, collecting water samples and removing obstacles from the fields.

Photo of the scarecrow challenge at the Robotic Drone League. (Matt Reed/East Tennessean)

Schools are paired up into a “Red Alliance” and “Blue Alliance” where each alliance would compete against each other to complete the previously mentioned tasks in a 10-minute time period where in the final two minutes students are allowed to enter the opponent’s zones and sabotage them!

For the Junior League, the young students would partake in a five-minute competition where students would fly drones through several hoops and do maneuvers such as flips in the air.  On the ground, the robots would be driven over bridges to retrieve items and bring them back to the starting positions. The final part of the competition consisted of answering questions and trivia.

After scoring there were several awards given out for many things such as the highest scores and the most innovative teams. The young students were all gathered up and went through a line high-fiving each other and the judges showed not just their skills in robotics but good sportsmanship as well.

There are several upcoming events this summer hosted by the RDL and STREAMWORKS. In June they will be hosting an Advanced Underwater Robotics Educator Workshop on June 3-7 and an Advanced Robot Drone League Educator Workshop on June 10-14. In July they have two more workshops starting July 17-19.

“Next year we are planning to focus on Appalachia and coal mining. We want to address the issues that are affecting our communities now due to the mining, from acidic soil to toxic water,” stated Courtney. He says they plan to partner with MindShaft to tackle ways to develop Appalachia after mining. Next year’s challenge should be officially announced by May 1, 2024.

For more information on the RDL, visit their website at www.robotdroneleague.com.