Feature: The Phantom haunts competitors at robotics competition

The Phantom stacked a set of seven storage bins with one garbage can on top of it. Team Gear It Forward, designers of the Phantom were golden.

But another member of their alliance had a problem; Argos 1756 had a broken elevator. It had snapped. This put the Argos' robot at a disadvantage, and all they could do was move out of the way and let the other teams stack.

Team captain Brandon Kreitzer and driver Patrick Ubelhor carefully maneuvered the Phantom back to a point where they could start a second stack of seven storage bins.

In a way, the competition had ended more than a month ago. The design of the Phantom was likely to be the main factor in the team's performance on Saturday. Team Gear It Forward had put more than four hours each weekday and more than eight hours on the weekend into the Phantom.

Four-year-veteran Kreitzer has been on the robotics team his entire high school career, and he and his team have put more than 200 hours each into the Phantom.

The robot's design is simple, and works remarkably well on the field: "We have a drive piece down there so we can actually drive and maneuver on the field and around our opponents and all that," Kreitzer told Xinhua.

"We have an intake, two wheels that spin inwards and it actually sucks the [box] into the robot, and that allows us to take acquisition so we can begin stacking them," he said. "And an elevator mechanism that raises the [boxes], and it sucks the next one in underneath it."

Bryan Rickards, mentor for Team Gear It Forward, coached Kreitzer and his driver as the Phantom was on the field, but his influence stretched back to the design phase as well. "We tried a new arm design that we thought was going to work but it really didn't," he told Xinhua.

"It wasn't up to our standards and how robust a system we want to have for our robot, so we went back to something else that we knew worked, and that's worked really well to get us in the position where we're at right now," he said.

As a result, the two arms became something that the team is proud of. Electrical engineer Evan Grove showed them to Xinhua. "This is something special right here," he said, motioning to the two arms.

But Gear It Forward lost the round when the Argos 1756 failed to do anything but move to a score zone, scoring a single point.

After the robots were cleared from the field, team member Kevin Tran spoke to Argos. He returned with good news: "They're fixing it right now. They should be up and running next match, there shouldn't be any issues."

Gear it Forward's next match went well. As well as the next one, and then the final. In the end, they were awarded the competition's most prestigious award, the Chairman's Award, which FIRST, the organizers of the robotics competition, says honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST.

The FIRST Robotics Competition is a multi-national competition in which high-school students work with mentors to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way.

As a result of their performance, Gear It Forward will soon compete in St. Louis, in the U.S. state of Missouri later in April at the world championship, alongside teams from as far away as China and Australia. Since the competition is sponsored by industry giants like Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar, and Motorola, the competition is likely to be fierce. Endi