It’s all nerves, gears and wires at annual robot contest

By Jean Reid Norman

Friday, March 27, 2009 | noon

The team from Boulder City was all nerves as it rolled its robot to the inspection station Thursday, the practice day of the FIRST Robotics Competition. The rookie team’s creation had been 60 pounds overweight on its debut run in February and members had worked around the clock for three days to get the weight down before the deadline.

“If it’s still overweight, we’ll have to start drilling and take parts off,” Sy Grothe, one of the adult volunteers, said. In a worst-case scenario, he said, operating parts would have to come off that would hamper the robot’s ability to do its job — picking up and tossing balls. That would be OK, he said.

“The most important thing is to be on the field,” Grothe said. “There is strategy to just being out there.”

Once the robot got to the scale, the weight was over by seven-tenths of a pound. A single cylinder was taken off, and Eagle 1 was two-tenths of a pound under.

The team breathed a sigh of relief, but the rookies were not the only team to have weight problems.

Coronado High School came for its fifth year with a robot team members called their best yet.

But it weighed in at 1.9 pounds over and a fraction of an inch too wide where a spoke protruded.

“The judges are being really tough on the regulations,” sophomore Josh Zeibel, 16, said. “I guess that’s why there are rules.”

The Coronado team got to work, pulling out a hammer to pound in the spoke and a drill to take off the weight.

“They’ll fix that. It won’t be a problem,” team adviser Sam Winn said. “They’ve worked on the robot a lot. They know what to do and know we have plenty of time to do it.”

On a second inspection, the robot passed with flying colors and ran its practice runs well, Winn said.

The annual contest challenges teams of high school students to take a kit provided by the nonprofit FIRST Robotics Competition and build it to accomplish a given task that changes each year. All teams received their kits on Jan. 3 and had six weeks to complete the robot before shipping it off to storage until the competition.

The regional event at the Thomas & Mack Center has attracted 48 teams, 14 of them local, to go head-to-head for bragging rights and the chance for scholarships. The free event is open to the public. Matches are scheduled from 9:50 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Friday and from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday.

No Internet use is allowed during the competition, because it interferes with the wireless system that operates the robots, organizers said.

Most teams were seeing their robots for the first time since the Feb. 17 deadline, but not the veteran Cimarron-Memorial High Rollers. The past champions traveled to San Jose State University two weeks ago to compete in another regional contest, where the robot made it into the semi-finals with nine wins and four losses.

The challenge this year is to design robots that can operate on a slick surface. The robots are divided into two teams of three, each towing a small trailer that holds hollow balls. The object is for one team to scoop up balls and throw them into the other team’s trailers in the allotted two minutes.

Some robots are designed to use a little human help. Team members are allowed to stand outside the playing field and throw balls into a receptacle or into trailers.

“That wastes time in our eyes,” said Cimarron-Memorial senior Randall Jones, 18.

The High Rollers gave their robot a turret and a camera that can recognize the opposing team’s trailers and change the speed of the robot as needed. The camera automatically aims the turret at the appropriate trailer.

“One step out of the shooting equation is done,” team member Cody Wall, 16, a sophomore, said.

The system worked well in San Jose, but the team found out during trials that different lighting at the Thomas & Mack will require adjustments, adviser Marc Rogers said.

Performance is only one part of the competition, however. Equally important in the grading are safety, design and what participants call “gracious professionalism.” That means that opposing teams help one another, and the top prize for professionalism is the most coveted, said Stacy Nelson, a former Cimarron-Memorial member and lead robot inspector at the Thomas & Mack.

In its fifth year at UNLV, FIRST Robotics has grown from three local teams to its current size and has racked up some successes of its own, UNLV spokesman Tony Allen said.

Nearly 90 percent of students who compete go on to attend college, he said, and more than 40 percent go into engineering. The key, Allen said, is that students become problem-solvers.

“They have to think on the spot,” Allen said. “They don’t learn that in the classroom.”

For the students, the appeal is the creative process and the camaraderie.

“You build a robot for a few months and see the creation come to life,” said Coronado senior Alexandra Ball, 16. “And it’s a lot of fun to be able to meet different teams.”

Alexis Lagan, 16, a sophomore on the rookie Boulder City High School team, said it was a feat to finish the robot.

“It’s something I didn’t think we’d be able to accomplish when we started,” she said. “What we’ve accomplished is so cool.”