Published: March 17, 2007 12:21 am            

Robotics teams lend a hand to competition

As high school robotics teams go, Kokomo High School’s TechnoKats are apparently a bit of a dynasty, kind of like I.U. basketball or Pittsburgh Steelers football.

It doesn’t, however, seem to have gone to the TechnoKats’ heads.

In the “pits” during Friday’s qualification rounds at the Boilermaker Regional of the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — or FIRST — robotics competition, the TechnoKats were everywhere.

Taylor High School’s Robo-Titans team, in just its second year, had a couple TechnoKats hovering around the dry erase board in its pit stall, helping the Titans get a strategy together.

Then there was the mentor from one of the Indianapolis teams, stopping by the TechnoKats’ pit stall, thanking them profusely for helping her team with some technical know-how.

It isn’t often you hear a high school student (or even one of the college students who still travel to competitions with their high school team) throw around the term “gracious professionalism,” but the phrase was repeated Friday when the competitors tried to explain the FIRST philosophy to a novice observer.

“It’s about kids working with mentors — it isn’t a science fair,” said TechnoKats team leader Andy Baker, a past recipient of the FIRST competition’s highest mentoring award. “The kids get to work with people who are professionals in their field. They get to see what I do. Maybe they won’t want to do that, but it’s something to help them find out what they might want to do.”

If the adult mentors, many of them engineering professionals, are liberal with the help they offer their respective teams, they also aren’t stingy in offering it to other teams.

The TechnoKats’ No. 45 entry, for instance, boasts a two-speed transmission, giving their robot an extra burst of speed in competitions.

Not only does the team offer the specs for the transmission on its Web site, but it’s also invited the Robo-Titans to test their robot at the TechnoKats’ Duke Energy-sponsored practice facility.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the TechnoKats, which came into existence in 1992, the very first year of the competition, are one of the big boys in the field.

But if watching Western High School teacher Joe Reel’s PantherTech team downloading a fix to its robot via a laptop computer is any indication, Howard County’s other teams may be catching up quickly.

This year, the teams’ new task was to pick up inflated swim float rings and place them on pegs situated at varying heights on a rotating stand in the middle of the playing “field.”

There were other rules, all compiled in a manual, which might appear extremely confusing to the casual observer, but seemed to pose no problems to the competitors.

For bonus points, the teams had the option of adding ramps to their robots. If a robot could successfully lift another robot to a certain height and hold it there, the three-robot “alliance” competing together was almost certain to win that particular round.

None of the Howard County teams went the ramp route; Taylor team leader Mark Pendergast, like his Western and KHS counterparts, said his team wanted to focus on performing the swim float ring task.

Not that the task was easy. Western’s robot couldn’t grip the rings, so competitors tried to knock the rings off the robot’s arm. Taylor’s entry was shoved around quite a bit.

And Kokomo’s team suffered a major embarrassment during an attempt to place a ring on the stand during the “automode” period preceding one round.

Instead of manually guiding the robot via a joystick, the students downloaded a computer program into the robot, hoping the program would automatically guide the robot through the task.

Unfortunately, the robot simply kicked into high gear, sped off and crashed dramatically into the peg stand, coming to rest upside down and immobilized.

The TechnoKats took the machine back to the pits. Inside 20 minutes, they’d replaced the bent picker-upper arm, adjusted the bumpers protecting the wheels, and downloaded a new automode program that almost worked during the next round.

Impressive, but perhaps less impressive than the good-natured camaraderie flowing around the armory building on the Purdue University campus.

Today, the teams will finish their qualifying rounds, and hope to land one of 24 spots in the today finals.

Whoever makes the finals, they’ll likely find plenty of gracious support from the competition.

        

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