Inside FIRST Robotics 2009: Robots are Now Ready to Rumble

• FIRST Robotics
• Dean Kamen
• engineering
• robotics
• Robotics

The tension brimmed outside Room 254, the home base of George Westinghouse High School’s FIRST robotics team, the Pirates. Six weeks of late-night work sessions, capped by a sleepless holiday weekend of final tweaks and modifications, had put the Brooklyn students at wits’ end. It was less than 24 hours before the construction deadline, when Fed-Ex would arrive to ship the robot to the scene of New York City’s regional competition—and an overweight robot threatened to send them over the edge.

“Welcome to 2009,” Nadav Zeimer, the team’s coach, declared as two Pirates argued over how best to position the robot on the scale. “Yet another year of too much weight.”

A Whole New Ball Game
Ironically, the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition was supposed to provide a whole new experience for veteran teams. The game design committee, headed by inventor and FIRST founder Dean Kamen, made significant changes to the rules of this year’s challenge—changes devised in part to erase the advantages returning teams had gained in previous competitions.

The objective of the game, dubbed “Lunacy 2009” in honor of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, is to score points by launching “moon rocks” into trailers attached to opposing teams’ robots. For the first time, the game floor will be a slippery polymer surface. When combined with special plastic wheels on the robots, it generates very little friction, mimicking lunar gravity and potentially sending the robots into uncontrollable skids with every sudden stop or sharp turn.

This posed a new challenge for the Pirates, who were accustomed to engineering robots that could tear across a carpeted surface. “At first, we weren’t sure how many wheels to put on it,” said senior Jason Lewis, the team captain. “But there’s not that much you can do [to gain traction], unless you make some crazy braking mechanism. If you add eight wheels it’s not going to increase your friction. It’s just more wheels slipping, more weight and battery power being drawn.”

Instead, Lewis sketched out a robot that could effectively score points without moving much—a design that transferred from paper to parts largely unaltered. The robot employs a rotating turret capable of launching seven moon rocks in only four seconds, with a maximum distance of nearly four feet. A series of conveyor belts inside the robot suck moon rocks into a vertical shaft, which is capped with a rapidly spinning wheel that the Pirates simply call “the shooter.”

Once rocks reach the shooter, they’re ejected—hopefully towards the opposition’s trailer. The turret, which looks a bit like the hood of a ventilation shaft, has a 200-degree field of rotation, which the Pirates hope will keep it from having to make too many skid-inducing turns.


A rotating turret on the robot is capable of launching seven moon rocks in four seconds.

Mesh! Mesh! Mesh!
After weighing, re-weighing, and then weighing the robot again, the Pirates conceded that the scale was not broken, and that the bot did indeed weigh 125 pounds—five pounds over the limit, according to the rules. “Let’s start trimming the fat,” said mentor and Pirate alum Mike Vilarelle, as he went to work with a liposuctionist’s scrutinizing eye (and Sharpie).

Team members quickly identified excess Lexan plastic and an expendable stainless steel motor shaft. Olan Ray Frith, another team mentor, proposed replacing the Lexan with construction mesh. This promptly divided the team into two factions: One led by Vilarelle, which maintained that the best method would be to drill holes in the heavy plastic siding, and another, more populist movement, led by Frith. Several students joined him in the short-lived chant “MESH! MESH! MESH!”

Eventually, the idea gained traction, and with few other viable options the team began replacing the Lexan siding with the considerably lighter fabric. “I’ve been saying mesh for six weeks,” Frith said, smiling, over his small victory.

With the contentious late design modification complete, the Pirates finally had time to test drive their robot. The construction mesh turned out to be a fortuitous choice. Whereas the moon rocks tended to get jammed inside the rigid Lexan walls, the mesh was more forgiving.

“The mesh doesn’t hold the balls, so they don’t get jammed as much as they used to with the Lexan,” senior Jeremy Joseph observed while watching a test battle between the two Westinghouse robots (the students built clones to represent both a girls team and a boys team). Then he described the happy coincidence in high school terms: “It was an accident. It was like, ‘OH! Remember yesterday? Two balls would get stuck down there.’ Plus, now it looks hot, too.”


The competition-ready robots, complete with mesh.

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