Grandville Robotics Team History
The RoboDawgs began as a rookie team in the 1998-99 season as well as the inital FIRST roboics team in the greater Grand Rapids area. The team began with only one sponsor, the engineering firm X-rite which resided in the the Grandville area. The team started very small, with only 18 students and a teacher from the high school as coach. The driving force behind the creation of our team came from our first mentors. Many of these mentors remain deeply involved in FIRST to this day. Being such a small and new team, we didn't have the resources to travel to a competition, so instead we held an invitational in our high school gymnasium. This small invitational would eventually evolve into the West Michigan Regional that is now held at Grand Valley State University. From these humble beginning the RoboDawgs attempted to create a thriving team that would be able to create a solid robot, teach FIRST values to others and have fun along the way.
The first few years were building years, but they ended up as some of the most succesfull years in the RoboDawgs history. For example in 2001 the team recieved the National Honorable Mention-Technical Execution award as well as the Motorola quality award and even attended the National competition that year. The following year, we won the Championship Kliener Perkins Caulfield and Byers Entrepenuership award for our business planning an structure. IN 2003 we won the General Motors Industrial Design award for the intuitive degin of our robot, as well as the Delphi's "Driving tommorow's Technology" award for our intricate and clean electrical design.
