A2GO Robotics

Our Ann Arbor based rookie team of middle school students is learning to design and build a robot for competing in the First Tech Challenge robotics competition. Our team (#30444) will compete in at least two FTC competitions in Michigan in 2025/2026. In each competition we compete against, but also collaborate with, many other teams.

On Nov. 8th, we competed in the Midland Great Lakes Bay Region Qualifier, where we won FIRST's Inspire Award, taking first place in the competition. We're also part of the Michigan South Central Robotics league, and will be competing in 4 days of game competition followed by a qualifier tournament. Because of our win in Midland, we will also advance to the States Northwest competition in Muskegon. We aim to advance to the FIRST Championship in Houston!

Our team is open publishing our designs, notebook, and build process. Find our design information and related links here.

In FTC we build a robot to score points in games where the rules change each year. The theme of the upcoming 2025/2026 FIRST competition is First Age, with the competitions themed around archaeology. The FTC challenge will be called Decode; the rules were released on September 6th. Find out more about this year's game at https://ftc.game/. In FTC, points are scored by accomplishing autonomous and driver-controlled objectives (like putting blocks into scoring boxes, throwing balls into goals, parking in a specific location, or having the robot climb scaffolding).

But it’s not only about competing with the robot! We also make reports to describe our robot and our team, and give presentations to panels of judges. We learn to run a small business, including managing a budget and fund-raising so that we can pay for competition registrations and new robot parts.

We also participate in outreach events like talking about robotics at the Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad, WESO! All this takes many resources. Consider helping us, including by sponsoring our team.