Student spirit-powered robots

03/05/04

RICHARD L. HILL

Katherine Ingle beams as she looks over Controlled Chaos, an elaborate robot that has taken six weeks of thoughtful and sometimes frenzied work to develop -- a "creature" that, if it carries out its tasks, will be anything but chaotic.

An 18-year-old senior at Corvallis High School, Ingle says her 20-member team often has worked into the wee hours of the morning on the complex machine. But the effort has paid off, and they're ready to show off their robot today and Saturday at a regional robotics competition in Portland's Memorial Coliseum.

The coliseum's floor looked like a huge machine shop Thursday as Ingle and about 750 other high school students from seven states gave last-minute tweaks to their inventions. The event has drawn 13 teams from Oregon and 24 teams from Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, Montana and California. The teams will contend for a variety of awards, including a trip to the First Robotics Championship in Atlanta from April 15 to 17.

"A lot of work has gone into this, but it's also a lot of fun," says Ingle, a three-year veteran of the competition who hopes to be an aeronautical engineer. "We've not only learned how to operate a variety of tools and figure out how to build a robot, but we also learned how to work together."

The competition is sponsored by an organization called First, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Inventor Dean Kamen, best known for his Segway Human Transporter, started the annual event 14 years ago.

This year, more than 20,000 students on 900 teams are competing at 27 regional contests. The teams come from Canada, Brazil, Great Britain and almost every U.S. state. Three-dozen universities are offering $3.8 million in scholarships to participants.

These aren't robots that try to destroy one another. Instead, they must perform intricate tasks.

This year's competition, titled "First Frenzy: Raising the Bar," requires radio-controlled robots to collect and pass 13-inch-diameter balls to human players, who then shoot them into fixed and moveable goals. There also are three 30-inch-diameter balls that can be placed by the robots on top of the goals. The robots, which can't weigh more than 130 pounds, also can attempt to hang from a 10-foot-high ball.

Teams were told on Jan. 10 what the game would entail, then had six weeks to design, build and test their robots using the same kit of parts and a standard set of rules. The students work with professional mentors. Each robot costs a team as much as $10,000 to build, which requires students to find sponsors.

"We want the kids to work side by side with mentors so that they learn how to make decisions when problems come up," said Bill Buskirk, chairman of the regional competition committee. "The kids think this is about building a robot, but it's really about learning to work together with others and developing a variety of skills."

Buskirk, who heads ImTech in Corvallis, also is serving as mentor for a team made up of students from five Linn County high schools.

"A key, underlying philosophy behind this event is something called 'gracious professionalism,' " he said. "It means you not only compete against other teams, but you help them out if they're having problems getting their robots to run."

Doug Edmonds, an engineer with Hewlett-Packard who is lead mentor for a team from Philomath High School, said the students worked a total of about 1,200 hours after school and on weekends designing and building their robot.

"They think it's about putting together a robot," Edmonds said. "But . . . they develop people skills, business skills, time-management skills. It's a lot more than putting a machine together."

Buskirk said he hopes Portland can host the regional competition again next year, but he said the challenge will be in coming up with about $180,000 to hold the event. He said NASA gave a $125,000 grant for this year's competition, but the space agency won't be contributing next year.

"This is an unusual event that really gets kids interested in science and technology," Buskirk said, "It brings in diverse students from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of skills, so we hope to keep it going."

The competition's spirit perhaps was best represented by Jeff Ruland, a 17-year-old junior from tiny New Town in rural North Dakota. The seven-member team, which traveled to Portland by train, had to keep its robot, Little Foot, simple.

"The nearest town with a machine shop is 70 miles away," Ruland said, "so our robot was made with the tools we had on our farms and ranches. But we got it done, and in my mind, we've already won just for accomplishing that."