The future is now at Atascadero High School, where students are bringing a robot to life to compete at a world competition.

Inside an old Quonset hut, students work at building the future of robots. The Atascadero High School Greyhound Revolutionary Robotics team, or Greybots for short, has a robot that can move, extend, pick things up, and all at the control of a couple of joysticks... but that was last year's robot.

"It is really exciting when it's booting up, it's like whoa!" says student Katy Forte.

This year's model is supposed to shoot balls through a hoop eight feet in the air, and sometimes it can shoot even further than that.

"Just trying to figure out how to shoot best, there's so many ways, we thought maybe a catapult, launching it, or a slingshot, but we found this was the best design for what we wanted to accomplish," says student Bryce Youngquist.

Every student team is given basic instructions and materials. Then they are set free to design and build their own robot in exactly six weeks. When the robot is done, it will compete against others from countries like Germany and Israel.

"It teaches the kids how to work together, how you can solve a bigger problem than what you could by yourself, by working as a team, that's what we do here, not just one of us could do it by ourselves," says team mentor Ralph Nicovich.

The students have raised about $15 thousand to attend Atlanta for the world competition, but they are trying to raise $15 thousand more.

The world competition is in April. To help out, or for more information go to http://www.greybots.com/.