Students Design Robot to Win Contest : Science: University City High students design a tennis ball-snatching robot they hope will grab top honors.
What’s the best design for a remote-controlled robot to gather tennis balls--while roaming across an arena of inch-deep dried corn kernels--and defend the cache from competing robots that might want to steal the treasure?
For a talented group of 30 University City High School students, the answer lies in a sleek, miniature version of a shopping cart, complete with motors, ball-grabbing extension arms and pencil-thin spoke wheels to churn almost friction-free through the corn.
That’s the entry that the students, together with their two engineering mentors from IMED Corp., the school’s business partner, will send forth in a first-of-its-kind national competition this week in Manchester, N.H.
The contest is the latest brainchild of engineering professor Woodie Flowers, a specialist on innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The idea is to promote science and technology careers among American high-school students. Similar contests in Japan draw thousands of spectators to watch teams from every part of that nation vie for honors.
University City High is one of only two West Coast high schools preparing for the inaugural “Maize Craze” competition, sponsored by U.S. First, a nonprofit coalition founded by New Hampshire entrepreneur Dean Kamen to stimulate technology.
Kamen extended an invitation through San Diego-based IMED, a worldwide designer and manufacturer of intravenous drug equipment, because of his longtime connection with the company through various medical inventions.
The IMED-University City team will be up against 27 other high schools linked with mega-sized corporations including AT&T;, Boeing, Delco Electronics, IBM, Motorola and Xerox. Several colleges--Harvard and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute among them--will compete independently.
Students and engineers have been putting in long hours after school and on weekends, brainstorming ideas, learning how hard it is to transform designs into products, and figuring out strategies for garnering a winning number of tennis balls.
Four teams will compete at a time in two-minute competitions, attempting to retrieve 75 green tennis balls worth one point each and piled in five locations on a 12-foot-by-12-foot field, and four red tennis balls perched on four corner posts and each worth 15 points.
Each team is limited to a special kit of materials provided by U.S. First as well as $200 in additional parts of its choice that can be purchased from a designated supplier. For example, designated motors are the same ones that power the seats in a Cadillac.
“We’ve learned how things can go wrong, what’s possible and not possible” when you design something, said sophomore Michal Weber, one of four “drivers” who will put the University City robot through its paces in Manchester.
“It’s easier to understand something when you build it,” added fellow sophomore Eitan Levy. Junior Daniel Calabrese discovered that abstract physics proved useful in making various calculations for the robot, such as the angle to position thin wire strips and make tennis balls “shoot up” into the robot’s cage.
IMED engineer John Thompson took charge of sifting student ideas on how to propel the robot, while colleague Phil Eggers worked with the teen-agers on strategies for getting the tennis balls. Their main challenge: “Showing the kids the trade-offs, and how best to make them, in carrying out a design with limited resources,” Thompson said.
At first, most of the students preferred a robot to capture a maximum number of balls on the ground. But junior Raghu Parthasarathy held out for a more elaborate design to snare balls from the posts.
Only after the group tested numerous prototypes--including a toy Hovercraft and several remote-controlled race-car models--did it settle on a final design closer to Parthasarathy’s first idea. The group also agreed to have its robot “run from” rather than “fight” a competitor designed to try to take away its balls.
That’s where IMED fabricators like Chuck Botts, Maher Moubayd and Bob Gauthier came in, spending long hours on their own time in the IMED labs attempting to meet both student expectations and contest specifications.
“Our biggest challenge has been to get students to take risks in their strategies,” Botts said. He personally would have preferred a more radical robot that plants itself in one spot and then shoots out a scissors-like arm to snare balls.
“But the kids wanted a vehicle--and that’s all right. The real point to this is education--to get them thinking about how science makes the transition from an idea in your head to the physical creation.”
As the final prototype came together last weekend, IMED created a corn-filled arena in its back parking lot where Eggers put the four student “drivers” through 18 separate strategies for maneuvering the robot to the four posts.
Stopwatch in hand, Eggers carefully charted times on various runs. The students will select their final strategy after watching what the competition has up its sleeve during practice rounds in Manchester before the games begin in earnest on Thursday.
“You have to be out of your mind as an engineer to get involved in a contest like this,” Eggers said, “except if you have a desire to work with kids. It’s been terrific!”
