Kell Robot Makes 'Popular Mechanics'

Kell's robotics team didn't win the FIRST Championship in St. Louis over the weekend, but it may have won something even better: a big feature story in Popular Mechanics, the bible of tinkerers, inventors and the mechanically inclined everywhere.

The story focuses on , the clever remote-control mechanism for cleaning up oil spills that earned the team a $10,000 grant and students Carlie Schulter and Matthew Tompkins a in February.

A one-third-scale model of the Oil Recovery and Capture robot made the trip to St. Louis and obviously wowed Popular Mechanics.

Some of the next steps for Kell and ORCA, the magazine says, are to build a training simulator for ORCA pilots; to extend the remote-control range from a half-mile to two miles; and to finish assembling the full-size ORCA for water testing this summer.

And while Kell didn't win the FIRST Robotics Competition Rebound Rumble, the robotics team still had a strong weekend, posting a 7-2 record and finishing 30th out of 100 teams in the Archimedes bracket.

More About Kell Robotics

• .
• .
• .