A group of young men from Columbia Falls and Kalispell have been working on a robot that throws balls into a basket for many months now. They now get to test their machine against dozens of others halfway around the world in a competition in Istanbul, Turkey, later this month.

The boys, ages 13 to 18 are members of the Thunder Lab Robotics team. The team was formed by Jodi Clark, a mom who previously taught a Lego class, but admits robotics weren’t in her wheelhouse. She coaches the squad with Sara Owens, another mom.

“I had no idea how to build a robot,” she said during a visit to the team’s lab, located in a small strip mall in Kalispell. 

But after a couple of years at the helm of the program the squad works like seasoned veterans.

The robot competition is called First Tech Challenge, with teams across multiple countries. Each September the teams are tasked with building a robot that competes against several other robots to complete a set task. In this year’s challenge, the boys had to build a robot that would pick up balls and successfully throw them into a basket.

“For the first 30 seconds, it’s completely autonomous,” explained Casen Clark, a senior home schooler from Columbia Falls and Jodi Clark’s son. After that, they use a remote control to guide the robot against the others, as they scurry about on wheels, picking up balls and flinging them into the baskets.

On this day, Clark, Sam Owen, Sylar Donaldson, Owen Nelson and Miles Nelson (no relation)  are busy fine-tuning their craft for the international competition June 26-28.

They didn’t build the robot entirely from scratch. They start with a “starter bot” from an online company and then add features from there. It has sensors on its base and a camera and “knows” where it is in autonomous mode by reading what looks like a QR code in the arena.

The robot has multiple gears, wheels, motors and a flywheel that picks the balls up and sends them airborne. It has to be perfectly timed, noted programmer Owen Nelson, or it doesn’t work right. He’s been writing the code for the robot from scratch using Java, he said. Every time they make a mechanical change on the craft, he has to make a programming change, he noted.

The entire project exposes the youths to a host of different fields in science, technology and math, which is the whole point. Coach Clark notes that STEM jobs will be in high demand in a workforce that will utilize artificial intelligence heavily in the future.

The team has successfully raised enough funding to pay for the trip to Istanbul, but could always use support. Each season they have to build a new robot based on the competition’s parameters and the competition requires extensive travel across the state. They qualified for the Turkey competition by placing in the top five in the region, which includes all of Montana. They did better than more than 30 other teams.

Their robot also won the design award at the state championship, as well as several other accolades. To learn more, visit www.teamthunderlab.org.