Salvius Draws Interest at FIRST Robotics

Salvius URL displayed at FIRST Robotics competition

This weekend was the official qualifier for the FIRST Robotics FTC competition. For anyone who does not already know; FIRST stands for; For Inspiration and Inspiration of Science and Technology. It is a competition for smaller robots built by teams to complete various challenges that are created for each year. I act as a coach, engineer, and general prototyper for our local team which competes at this competition. Despite the fact that my robot Salvius is a bit too large to qualify for this competition I was still able to incorporate my personal ventures into this team sport. Having spent many hours and several dollars of my own money towards our FTC robotics team already, I felt obliged to list myself as a sponsor as we had no real sponsors prior to the competition. I printed out a simple label with a URL and QR code and taped it to the sleeve of my team t-shirt. Sure enough, as I met with the members of several other teams at the competition the conversation often led to questions about the URL taped to my arm. It served as a great way to inform like-minded people about my project and as I told a few of them; it is my intent to eventually transport Salvius to one of these compensation to act as a mascot while our team competes. Who can resist a big robot cheering people on at a robotics event of any proportion?

Please note that the robot Salvius is in no way related to FIRST nor any team that competes in any FIRST competition. Salvius is not intended to compete in the FTC or FRC robotics competitions.