A2Go Robotics

Our Ann Arbor based rookie community team of middle school students is learning to design and build a robot for competing in the First Tech Challenge robotics competition. Our team (FTC#30444) will compete in one two FTC Qualifier competitions in Michigan in 2025/2026. In each competition we compete against, but also collaborate with, many other teams. We're also part of the Michigan South Central Robotics league, and will be competing in a scrimmage, 3 4 days of game competition, followed by the league qualifier tournament.

Update: our team won the top award at our first qualifier, the Inspire Award. That award has qualified us to attend the Michigan States Northwest competition that will be held in Muskegon, Michigan in December. We hope to continue to develop our team, with the goal of moving on to the FIRST Championship (colloquially known as World's) in Houston, Texas at the end of the 2025-2026 FTC season.

Our team is open publishing our engineering designs, notebook, team portfolio, 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 will be released on September 6th. In FTC points are scored by accomplishing autonomous and driver-controlled objectives (like putting blocksinto  scoring boxes, 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 offset costs like competition registrations and new robot parts.

We also participate in outreach events like talking about robotics at the Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad, WESO!