I very surprised to read this news. There are 1.678 teams participated in this competition..! I think this is really a great competition… 
==============================
Scientific achievement spurred cheers and impromptu dances Saturday for Michigan teens who took first and second places in a national robotics competition in Atlanta, Ga.
“I am so excited. It’s what every robotic team dreams about,” Gabrielle Elser, 18, of Huron Valley Schools in Milford said from Atlanta. Her team will share the prize with Illinois and California alliance members.
Together, they edged out an all-Michigan alliance comprised of Utica Community Schools, Berkley High School and Oakland County Area Schools in the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship at the Georgia Dome.
“Out of these 349 teams, four of the final six teams on the field were Michigan teams,” Dave Verbrugge, 48, said Saturday. Verbrugge mentored the winning team on behalf of General Motors Milford Proving Ground.
Huron Valley Schools’ robot was praised as incredibly fast, versatile and capable of shooting multiple balls at once.
A total of 1,678 teams had joined the robotics competition — some from as far away as Argentina — before the pack was whittled down to 349.
Michigan teams have won seven of the last eight national tournaments.
Last year, the roles were reversed: Utica Community Schools took the coveted prize while Huron Valley Schools came in second. But the teams joined forces, along with Pontiac Northern High School, to win the first-ever state championship in robotics earlier this month.
| Title | : | Michigan teens win in national robotics competition |
| Category | : | Robotics Competitions, Robotics News. |
| Tags | : | DROID #2344, first robotics competition, michigan, national robotics, robotics, |
The word robotics was derived from the word robot, which was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. In some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942). However, the word robotics appears in "Liar!"