BUXTON — On Pierce Drive in Buxton, hidden behind Donut Hole and 3-D Variety, lies a squat, concrete building that looks like an abandoned airplane hangar: Long, with a large bay door, and not a sign or a logo to be seen. Were it not for a row of vehicles parked out front, the place would look deserted.

That’s on the outside.

On the inside is a robot that plays basketball ”“ kind of.

“It’s made to pick basketballs up off the ground, and shoot them toward a designated hoop,” said Josh Goulet, a student at Bonny Eagle High School in Standish.

The robot, propped up on a workbench inside the building housing Tooling, Engineering and Machining, Inc., is not a humanoid robot ripped from the pages of a science fiction comic. Instead, it’s an oddly practical thing, a series of belts, cogs and wheels all working together to produce a simple effect: Get the ball in the hoop.

Its efficiency in completing that task will soon be put to the test. Goulet, who hopes to one day become a mechanical engineer, is a co-captain of the Bonny Eagle Robotics Team, a band of tool-wielding problem-solvers who have been working diligently to complete their latest project.

But they’re not the only ones: Scores of other groups, from across the county, country and the world, are all working on rival basketball-hurling apparatus, and from March 1-3 in Manchester, N.H., teams will compete for awards, recognition and a possible “shot” at greater glory.

That’s when an entity known as For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology will host the annual Granite State Regional FIRST Robotics Competition in that city’s Verizon Wireless Arena. The Bonny Eagle robot ”“ which must be completed by Feb. 21 at midnight, and no later ”“ will go up against robots from dozens of other groups from the U.S., Canada and Mexico, most of them high schools with corporate sponsors.

Bonny Eagle’s sponsors ”“ Fairchild Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, and TEM, Inc., which provides its building and work space ”“ has helped to pay for part of the roughly $20,000 cost of maintaining the robotics team and enrolling it in the annual competition. The remaining $12,000 was made up of donations from local companies, monthly bottle drives, bake sales and other fundraisers throughout the school year.

Team members who have been to the event in previous years say the fundraising efforts are worth it.

“The competition is so insane,” said Goulet’s father, Ted. “It’s just a really big party.”

Ted Goulet and Scott Tracy are in the midst of their second year as advisors to the Robotics Team; John DiRenzo, who had been the group’s advisor since its inception in 1996, has stayed on as a mentor, offering guidance and insight. DiRenzo admits that when the group was under his purview, it was more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-its-pants operation, with students often engineering as they went ”“ hitting roadblocks, starting over and improvising on the fly.

While not an ineffective method of operation per se, DiRenzo heaps praise upon Tracy and Goulet for bringing more planning and focus to the team’s mission.

“We didn’t have a lot of knowledge of how it was done before,” said Tracy. “We only knew how we would go about doing it.”

Under the new leadership, that means a lengthy planning process: The first half of the school year, team members draft plans for the robot in advance, and then build a scaled-down practice robot to test the design’s effectiveness before delving fully into the real device. That allows the group to troubleshoot beforehand, leading to a more efficient building process.

Even after all that planning, however, the group still finds itself scrambling to complete the robot before deadline, and expects there will be some late nights in the machine shop applying the finishing touches.

“That’s kind of the point, though,” said Tracy. “That’s one of the skills they’re learning. They’re going to up against this in the real world.

“That’s one of the big values of this program,” he said. “It’s competition, it’s teamwork, but it also prepares you for real life.”

Veteran robot gurus got a dose of that real life experience during the run up to last year’s competition, which tasked the group with creating a machine capable of picking up inner tubes and placing them on a series of pegs. Again, team members worked tirelessly during the last couple of weeks to complete the final design. Ted Goulet pointed out that while some of the other competing groups have the advantage of working on their robots for hours during the day, the comparatively ragtag band from Bonny Eagle must do what they can on Wednesday nights and weekends, sometimes making a mad dash toward the finish line.

But if last year’s experience was any indication, it’s a strategy that works. The inner tube robot won the Quality Award in 2011 for quality detail and fabrication, one of several awards given out at last year’s regional event. The team hopes its basketball robot garners similar accolades.

For a small group working out of a machine shop in Buxton, it would be quite a feat.

“We do compete very well against teams that are much more heavily funded,” said Tracy.

That, echoed several team members, is due to the camaraderie and teamwork that are implicit in a group with such a single-minded focus. It’s more passion than hobby, they said. With worries about social cliques, academic pressures and life in general dropped at the door to that squat, gray building, the only thing left is the robot, the competition and a sense of accomplishment.

Team member Jade Thibodeau summed it up rather succinctly: “Building robots is awesome,” he said.

— Staff Writer Jeff Lagasse can be contacted at 282-1535, Ext. 319, or at jlagasse@journaltribune.com.