Robot Loses, Students Come Home Winners

Although Robo Charlie came up short at a national competition in Orlando, the Chatsworth High School students who designed and built the robot still feel like winners.

“It was an absolutely fantastic experience for the kids,” said Assistant Principal Donna Wyatt, who accompanied the team to the contest last weekend at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center in Florida.

More than 6,000 students from 120 schools in 30 states participated in the three-day competition sponsored by a group called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST.

The robots in the competition were all designed, engineered and built by students with professional engineers and college engineering students serving as advisors.

Robo Charlie has an 11-foot-long vertical arm equipped with a clamp for grasping objects. The arm is attached to a 4-foot-square board with wheels at the corners. The robot is operated by two remote-control joysticks.

At the competition, teams advanced through a series of rounds by earning points each time their robot hung an inner tube on a tripod set up in the middle of a gymnasium-size floor, Wyatt said.

To make the task even trickier, she said, three robots were on the floor at the same time, knocking off their competitors’ inner tube while trying to hang their own.

“We had our inner tube on the top of the tripod, which gave us two points,” she said. “We knew we had it won; there were only two seconds left in the two-minute round.”

But just as they were about to celebrate, she said, a robot rolled up and knocked Chatsworth’s inner tube to the floor.

“We were disappointed,” she said. “But we’re already looking forward to next year.”