Tucson's Sonoran Science Academy team wins regional robotics contest

Perry can roll forward, backward and in a circle. He can grab things from the floor, see things and sense distance and pressure.

But Perry isn’t human. He’s made of metal and wires. He’s a robot, controlled using a computer and two video gaming joysticks.

In fact, Perry is a champion robot, designed and built by Crush 1011, the high school robotics team at Sonoran Science Academy Tucson, 2325 W. Sunset Road.

The team brought home the championship title from a regional competition in Denver last week along with other prestigious individual honors.

Now the students, in grades 10 through 12, are preparing to conquer the world in April in Houston at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, World Championship in Houston in April. There, they will compete against 400 other teams in one of two world competitions.

“They’re becoming real engineers,” said Adnan Doyuran, the school’s principal. The students manufactured most of the parts in the school’s robotics shop, designed the robot and built it from scratch.

But building a robot is only one part of what the team does.

“Everyone is integrated into the team,” said Remy Jesionka, 16. “We divide up the tasks.”

The team has engineers, designers, programmers, electricians as well as people who work on fundraising, sponsorship, photography, business planning and public relations.

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Those are all things that are judged in the competition.

The FIRST organization gives out a mission in January that includes rules, restrictions and guidelines and teams from around the world have six weeks to build their competition robots.

Team CRUSH, which stands for Creating Robots Under Severe Heat, also makes it a point to help other students, whether they’re underclassmen at their own school or from other schools around the state.

“We build more than robots,” said Reid Loeffler, a senior. “We build people.”

Reid said the team is working with the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind to start a robotics team there. It also helped other Tucson-area schools with establishing their own teams, including Lulu Walker Elementary School.

Ruben Castro, a junior who is one of the drivers of Perry, the robot, said he hopes the team will at least win its division, of which there are six total.

Last year, the team made it to semifinals. Bunyamin Purkaya, a physics teacher who is one of the team’s mentors, thinks that’s possible.

“Then we will go as far as we can,” Purkaya added.