BUTTE — For the past 12 years, students in the Montana Tech Robotics Club have been participating in national competitions that showcase their skills, and this year is no different.
In April, six students with the club will head to Ohio for the National Robotics Challenge that features a competition with fighting robots.
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"You have two robots and they’ll try to damage the other irreparably and, you know, be the last one standing," says Noah Barnhart, a mechanical engineering student at Tech.
Barnhart holds an apparatus that has a circuit board, wheels, and wires sticking out. To the untrained eye, it looks like a pile of junk, but to Barnhart, it looks like possibility.
"I see a start, a beginning. I can see this molding and changing into a variety of really cool, awesome things," says Barnhart.
While the robotics team’s main objective is to come home with the success of a victorious robot, the students are already participating in a successful tradition that reaches back to the inception of Montana Tech when Butte became the first city west the Mississippi to be electrified after the damns at Fort Peck brought power to the mines in Butte.
"Electrical engineering was one of the two first curricula here," says Professor Bryce Hill, the department head of Electrical Engineering at Montana Tech.
Once the power was supplied to the mines, the engineering department was eliminated until it returned to Montana Tech about 20 years ago.
"And it’s been a great boon since then. We focus in power—electrical power and controls and those two fields right now are booming in ways that we don’t even think about," says Professor Hill.
He says projects like the battle robot competition help connect students to the possibilities that are available within the field of electrical engineering.
"Anything we come up with, we can try and test out. And if it's possible, we can innovate it; that’s kind of the basis of engineering. You know, we have a problem and there’s just an infinite number of solutions to solve that problem," says Dustin Marquardt, a graduate student and robotics team member.
