The robotics team stared at its creation, like coaches studying an Olympic athlete.
Cooper Minehart was watching the robot’s ball-shooting arm.
Kate Sawyer worried about wall-climbing apparatus.
Team mentor Doug Jensen studied the aiming mechanism. “There’s the weakness,” he said to the students. “We need to speed up the aiming.”
Woodbury’s East Ridge High School robotics team was prepping last week for the national competition in St. Louis. Team members worked through the last-minute adjustments that they hoped would make their robot pivot, scramble and shoot better than anyone else’s.
Even in the midst of the stress, Jensen said he was delighted with the team. “The robots are an excuse,” he said, “to get smart kids together and do interesting things.”
The robotics season started in January, when the details of the annual contest were unveiled.
The team found out that the competition would have a medieval theme.
They would have to build a robot to catapult “stones” — actually 9-inch foam balls — through the windows of a castle-shaped fortress. Like knights on horseback, the robots would have to overcome obstacles called “rock wall,” “ramparts” and “drawbridge.”
The finale would be especially difficult. Each robot would have to lift itself off the ground, dangling from a horizontal 6-foot-high bar.
The team started with standardized parts that all teams use — wheels, motors, frame. They were able to add their own customized touches, spending a maximum of $4,000.
The deadline was 45 days later. That was when the team had to seal up its robot in a giant plastic bag to prevent anyone from working on it until tournament time.
But the team built a twin robot. From January until last week, they developed their robot-driving skills with the practice robot. And they improved it, adding tweaks and fixes.
Jensen explained that on the day of the competition, the team would unwrap the original robot and frantically try to duplicate the improvements they had made on the practice robot.
They would have only five hours. “We will fluff it up,” Jensen said.
To get all of that accomplished, the robotics team doesn’t function like a sports team.
For one thing, it’s wide open for participants, said Jensen, who calls himself “mentor” instead of a coach.
Yes, said Jensen, the team needs brilliant young science-nerds. But a robotics teams also requires kids who are good at marketing, fundraising, salesmanship and website development.
That’s because the team is more like a small business than a sports team.
“We have lot of back-office stuff to do,” Jensen said.
The team has to pick partners to build a three-team alliance for the competition — so negotiation skills are needed. This year, they partnered with the Math and Science Academy in Woodbury and Eastview High School in Apple Valley.
“We emphasize the fact that you must learn to communicate with people you don’t know,” said Jensen. “It forces kids to market themselves to other teams.”
Robotics, he said, combines cooperation and competition. “It’s cooper-tition,” Jensen said.
RATTLE, WHINE, KER-PLUNK
For last week’s dress rehearsal, the team met in a Cottage Grove city garage.
Team captain Minehart steered the robot with a remote-control device. The robot buzzed though a makeshift course like a lawnmower burning jet fuel, frantically lurching over obstacles.
Its nine motors made a chorus of rattles and whines as it picked up the balls, swiveled into position and catapulted them at the target — squeak, squawk, ker-plunk! — over and over.
Everyone watched. Everyone critiqued the performance.
Sawyer, a sophomore, noticed one bumper coming loose and retaped it. She replaced a battery.
Tejaswi Bhangi, a ninth-grader, was happy with the vision-tracking software that allows the robot to see the target.
It was the finale — the 6-foot lift — that worried them the most.
The team had bought two tape measures from a hardware store and jury-rigged them into the robot. At the right moment, a motor would thrust the tapes 6 feet straight up. Between the two tapes would be a bracket, and on the bracket, a hook.
The robot would wiggle until the hook latched onto the bar. Then, a winch on the robot would wind up a string attached to the hook — and the 120-pound contraption would rise majestically into the air.
At the end of the evening, they packed the robot into a trailer, and Jensen yelled, “Let’s go kick some ’bot!”
Indeed they did.
Last weekend, at the First Robotics World Championships in St. Louis, the robot performed well, said Jensen. Even the tape-measure Rube Goldberg lift-o-matic worked flawlessly, he said.
The team finished 36th out of 600 teams.
“It’s the hardest fun you will ever have,” Jensen said.