Denfeld Robotics Team Building its Robot

Duluth, Minn. — Come early next month the DECC will be crawling with robots. These robots will be different from the robots you’ve seen in the movies and on TV …. And they all will have been built by high school students. One of the school’s building a robot is Denfeld.

Robotics team 4009 has done very well in competition with the robots they’ve built. The coach of the team for the past ten years is Andrew Gunderson. He is the engineering and manufacturing instructor at Denfeld.He says the students have less than two months to take the robot from idea to competitio .

Gunderson said, “They work so hard, they don’t have a whole lot of time to build their robot each year. They have 6 weeks, maybe 7 weeks to go from when they get the competition to when they have to have a robot done and driving. “

There is a great deal of preparation that has to take place to have their robot ready for the Lake Superior Regional competition in early March. “They go through the entire process of prototyping, and building and wiring and programming and testing it and driving it in 6 to 7 weeks before they have to be competing with it,” Gunderson said.

For the past couple of years Carter Wedin, has been in charge of programming the robot, this year he has even more responsibility, Carter is the Build Captain. He’s responsible for overseeing the entire project.

But the team has many parts to it. Perhaps one of the most important, but far less noticeable is the business side.  Sofia DeCambaliza leads the efforts to raise the money that’s needed.
DeCambaliza said the business part of the team has a lot of responsibility as”we do most of the money raising. We do things like this. We organize going out and doing community outreach,”

And the program needs a lot of support. Thankfully grants from local service group help a great deal as does a recent agreement with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers or IBEW.

The students are responsible for all costs associated with the Denfeld, DNR Robotics 4009 team, while the school provides the space for the team to work.