Pecos High School has one team that competes in the Bell Advanced Vertical Robotics, more commonly known as Bell AVR. The official “driver” team consists of 7 people on the field, but the whole team includes “support staff” that help in the building of the drone, programming the smaller robots and drone, and doing all the other stuff necessary to compete.
This year’s challenge is called Fire Recon and Rescue. The field is a 15ft x 40ft x 15ft enclosure that represents Bell Valley. There are two drones. The big drone (which the students will build from scratch and program) will do most of the work of firefighting. The small drone will be mostly for reconnaissance. There is one fire truck that is supposed to transport the rescued people to a safe place. There are three firefighters that are supposed to be transported to the tops of the buildings by the big drone, and they are to rescue the people on the rooftops.
Our team did well on the reconnaissance portion of the competition, earning the maximum points for the autonomous round. This round involved the small drone, the RVR (fire truck) and the mini spheros (fire fighters). We lost points during the driver-controlled round because our big drone malfunctioned. Between matches, the students were able to go to Tech Support at the pit area, but even they had a hard time figuring out why the drone wouldn’t fly.
The first place winner was a team from Reston, Virginia, and 2nd place was a team from Austin, Texas. Both teams will compete in the finals on Dec 2, 2023.