This is done over a two-minute period. Though it may sound easy, it was difficult to build a robot under a certain budget and only being able to use the small parts manual to build the robot. It took about six weeks to build. The club receives help from parents and the engineers at Sandia National Laboratories. And as the date to the competition drew closer, the students worked on the Robot almost every single day at late hours.
Robot building is a combination of many aspects of engineering.
Math can be used to find the volume of the parts on the Robots. Also math can be used to figure out the length of chains and the position, velocity, and acceleration of the Robot as it reaches the puck. There is a lot of math that goes in programming the drive system. The control program interprets the commands sent from the joystick to the robot. The control program is written in P-Basic, a slight modification of the basic programming language.