Community Events

Local Robot Events

We have been active participants in helping to set up for 1-2 local events each year. We often do the grunt work of helping to set up the fields and game elements for the competitions the next day.

We also participate in a local league. As part of the league, we have given informational presentations, helped other teams with parts and advice, and of course, competed!

Cat Tour

We began our Tower Takeover "summer camp/48-hr build" with another day of learning about real-world robotics. On June 17, 2019 Joel Grimes, Product Marketing Engineer at Caterpillar, Inc., set up a multi-part tour of the Caterpillar campus in Clayton, NC. We talked with and experienced a "day-in-the-life-of-an-engineer" with product demonstrations and tours in the electronics programming department, the virtual reality department, and the engineer's work environment. We also drove around the campus to view the testing ranges for the different vehicles they build and test there. A tour of the manufacturing floor showed the assembly line procedures on LARGE scale and we ended the day by getting to remote test-drive skid steers ourselves!

S-T-E-A-M eXPOSITION

We were invited to showcase and demonstrate our robot and team at the 2nd annual STEAM exposition on March 31, 2019 sponsored by the Mecha Eagle team at the American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro, NC. We created a poster with a timeline of our turning point season, answered questions asked by the public that attended, helped the Mecha Eagles prepare for a competition they were going to be competing in during the summer and participated in exposition matches showcasing VEX and the Turning Point game throughout the day.

Intuitive surgical tour

On September 24, 2018 we were fortunate to get our first taste of real-life robotics. Nick Bernstein, Senior Manager Software Engineering at Intuitive Surgical in Raleigh, NC, gave us a tour of his lab space. We first got insight into how difficult surgeries are and some of the big problems surgeons can have, especially during abdominal surgeries. We then got to see first hand some of the solutions that robotic arms can provide to surgeons. We even had the opportunity to do remote surgery ourselves (on the fake dummy torso, of course). It was really inspiring to see CAD drawings of some of their parts and know that someday we too, may have CAD drawings hanging in an office where we work.

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