YPSILANTI, MI - Ypsilanti Community High School's Grizzly Robotics, Dexter High School's Dreadbots and Greenhills School's Lawnmowers are headed to the FIRST Robotics State Championship this weekend.

The Grizzlies are hoping for a three-peat as the winner of Michigan's Chairman's Award, which is the top honor in FIRST Robotics that goes to the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST.

YCHS team 66 and their robot - named Rosie after Rosie the Riveter - won the Chairman's Award at the district competition in Belleville on March 22 to 24, which secured them a spot at the state championship on April 11 to 14 at Saginaw Valley State University.

Approximately 160 teams will compete at the state championship, which decides who advances to the world championship competitions later this month. Detroit and Houston, Texas, will host the world championships.

The Dreadbots team earned a spot at the state championship by winning the district competition at Lakeview and finishing as a finalist at the district competition held at Lincoln High School. They also won two industrial design awards this season.

Greenhills School's Lawnmowers team, of Ann Arbor, also is headed to the state championship after coming in as a finalist at the Belleville district competition and winning an excellence in engineering award there.

This year's FIRST competition has a "Power Up" video game theme. Teams build and program robots, which then face off in three-team alliances to see who can best complete a series of tasks in the arena.

YCHS fields two robotics teams - team 66 and 470 - and they have been practicing on a make-shift arena set up in the school's media center.

Ypsilanti's STEMM Middle College, which is one of two small learning communities that make up YCHS, was founded on the principles of FIRST robotics, and the program has garnered national attention in recent years.

The team's Chairman's Award presentation highlights some of their notable accomplishments: traveling to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to lobby Congress to provide more funding for FIRST robotics, building a prototype of a time capsule satellite that the University of Michigan's CubeSate program will launch into space, planning a trip to China next year where Ypsilanti students will help 24 schools start their own robotics teams and being featured in an HBO documentary set to air in May.

FIRST robotics also is featuring the story of Grizzly Robotics at the world championship competitions this year.

"It's going to be a little bit more stressful at states because of what we have to do against more teams," said sophomore Jacob Egnor, who is one of the presenters for the Chairman's Award, along with juniors Jenae Gonzalez and Ariana Murphy.

The Grizzly Robotics Chairman's Award video features junior Jawann Odumodu, who talks about getting in trouble at school frequently during his freshman year of high school - until he joined the robotics team and found new motivation. He's now dual enrolled at Washtenaw Community College on his way to becoming a certified machinist.

2018 Chairman's Award video by Ypsilanti Grizzlies Team 66

Students on the YCHS robotics teams said the experienced sparked their interest in engineering and taught them soft skills. The STEMM Middle College gives students a fifth year of high school while they simultaneously complete their high school diplomas and earn associate degrees by dual enrolling at Washtenaw Community College.

This post was updated to include Greenhills School as one of the local teams competing at the FIRST robotics state championship.