By Wendi Reardon Price
Clarkston News Staff Writer
 Dallas — After four months of testing, building, practicing and preparing, Team RUSH 27A led the Bell Vertical Drones Championship, Dec. 3.
The team consisted of seven juniors and sophomores from Clarkston High School and two mentors from Team RUSH. They led the drone event with 336 336 points and a high scoring presentation which put them on top.
Kyle Hughes, team leader, shared the exciting part was the winners of the event received a 20 minute ride around Fort Worth in a Bell helicopter.
“The weekend was a complete surprise to me,” said Hughes, team leader. “The kids have been meeting with Mentor Andrew Luchenbach, a CHS grad of 2015, to work on solving the challenge. Bell posed the problem with fire fighting, so they had to fly the two drones, the Land Rover and three Spheros to extinguish the fire. All seven students were controlling some part of the game. We decided to do this to ‘learn.’ Never did I think we would win.”
Hughes added the four matches they played were the only four for the season while other teams had competed in more.

“Michigan was supposed to have two events that we were to qualify to advance to the championship,” she said. “They had trouble both weekends with the field electronics so we got a ‘bid’ to go to the championship and participate.”
She added when it came time it all worked out.
“The first round was amazing, but then things started to get crazy,” Hughes said. “We were having trouble with our WiFi connections between vehicles and lost all communication with our main drones camera move ment. Daniel (Bradstreet) did a great job improvising and we still scored high. This happened the next three rounds as well. We squeezed through with 336 points, with the next team at 318. It didn’t include our presentation score though. Then, we had to wait. It was very exciting. People came to us and asked if we were getting ready for the helicopter ride and I just kept thinking, ‘Don’t get excited until the final score comes in. Then, it did. It was so amazing.”
“It was a lot of fun and a great engineering challenge for our team,” said Bradstreet, a junior. “The opportunity we have been given from Bell and the Robotics Education Foundation has led us to gain valuable experience and life skills we will be able to use in the future.”
Junior Luke Jeung added they rose above challenges.
“While we failed a lot this season, we learned to fail faster so that when it came time to perform, we could play our very best,” he said. “I’m proud of this whole teams effort, tenacity and resilience, as that’s the reason we were able to play so well.”
Team RUSH shared a thank you to Bell and the REC Foundation for the amazing opportunities. Also, they thank Kettering University, who was also there cheering them on and sponsoring the team.
“We met so many people and made so many new connections. The kids learned an amazing amount of new technologies,” Hughes said. “They worked through the design process, machined parts, 3D modeled and printed, laser cut parts, cut vinyl and documented the entire process through our engineering design notebook. The skill sets these kids have acquired is overwhelming.”
She added 2022 has been an amazing year for Team RUSH. From March and April, they won all five of their tournaments including the Michigan State Championships. Then, they decided to fly drones. We are the #1 robotics team in Michigan.
Team RUSH kicks off their new 2023 robotics challenge in January. For more information, please visit www.TeamRUSH27.net

  drones, Team RUSH 27