FAIRMONT — No, that wasn’t a time-portal to a 22nd century ESPN telecast you wandered into Saturday at Fairmont State University.
Those really were small-scale robots, in real-time, playing disc golf on a mini-course set up at the Feaster Center.
The science-fiction enhanced sport was the main event of the 2023 Robotics Championship, featuring top high school teams from across the Mountain State.
Except, as said, it’s not science fiction.
It’s science fact — and the West Virginia Secondary Schools Activities Commission made it so in 2021 when it officially recognized robotics as a legitimate school activity.
“Sanctioning by the WVSSAC changed everything,” Todd Ensign said the day before, as he helped transform the Joe Retton Arena into a venue more the liking of, say, Isaac Asimov.
Ensign, the chief coordinator of the championship, is a Fairmont State faculty member and education resource manager at NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation facility, at nearby I-79 Technology Park.
When he isn’t doing that, he’s wrangling robots, and robotics teams, compromised of budding engineers and programmers from schools in every county in the Mountain State.
And many of them, he hopes just might someday be sporting employee badges at the Johnson facility, which is currently testing out the computer software that will help guide vessels on upcoming missions to the moon and Mars.
The state activities commission has put robotics in at least the same universe of varsity football or marching band with its recognition, Ensign said.
“We’re right up there.”
Which is also a good description, he said, of the intellectual and mechanical loftiness required by the practice and pursuit of robotics.
It’s all about gimbals, gear ratios, torques, coding and the like, Ensign added.
The robots have to literally hold together under the stress of the competition, he said, which is where the basic, structural engineering comes in.
Then, they have to be “told” what to do, which incorporates coding and other internal engineering.
Which on Saturday is lending itself to all those discs flowing in the direction of baskets on that small disc golf course set up for the occasion.
“It’s fun to watch,” Ensign said.
And it’s exciting to watch, when you find out everything that goes into the robots and their teams.”
Co-hosting the championship where Aurora Flight Sciences, which manufactures parts for stratospheric unmanned aircraft from its facility in Bridgeport; and A3L Federal Works, a woman-owned technology and infrastructure consulting firm, headquartered in the tech park in South Fairmont.
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