This year, the GearCats decided to build two robots, and as twins, named them in honor of NASA's current mission, Artemis (and her twin brother, Apollo). Both Artemis and Apollo utilize a turret design with 180 degree yaw, a hopper that is designed to fit under the trench and hold nearly 50 fuel and a climber that can reach L1.

The GearCats competed in Week 1 of comps at Cox Mill High School in Cabarrus County. With only 7 weeks from kickoff to design, build, program and test, week 1 was an incredible test for all teams. Because we built two robots, we were able to give an "alpha" bot to our programming team early in the build process while we built our competition bot. This meant that we were able to go into week 1 very well prepared and ended up being the captain of Alliance 2. We made it to the event finals and took home the Autonomous Award recognizing the strength and consistency of our autonomous routines. We also made an incredible showing scoring almost 150 points and winning a match on our own against three opposing robots, where both our alliance partners were down.

Our second district competition took place on week 3 at Heritage High School. Despite some unexpected technical glitches on Saturday that followed after some wiring was torn out during a practice match, we finished qualifications in fourth place and became Alliance Captain #3. Once again, we made it to the event finals before being eliminated. The team is incredibly proud of how we performed, overcoming numerous challenges, climbing back up through the rankings and still making it to finals. We were also awarded the Excellence in Engineering Award, recognizing the turret motor gear that was intentionally designed as the replaceable failure point under stress.