Robot Madness: Students compete for national prize | Photos

Published 10:55 am Thursday, March 29, 2012

The competition is about to begin and hopes are high for the Spartabots team. Their robot design is more conventional than their attempt last year.

At the ring of a buzzer, six robots begin shooting basketballs from their caddies – two misses for the Spartabots, but there are still more balls to be had.

Driver Blake Talbot directs his bot forward when its arm, designed to push down a bridge, begins slapping the ground at random. Then a chain breaks, making the boxy machine spin in circles.

“Everything on the robot went haywire,” Talbot says.

The team is rattled. The bot had worked fine during testing. Talbot then cracks a smile, “I was hoping it would be this exciting.”

The tournament was far from over. Skyline High School’s robotics club still had six more qualifying rounds at the FIRST Robotics Competition. With almost 100 teams, some international, it’s one of the biggest in the nation. They competed at the CenturyLink Event Center March 22-24.

The challenge was to design robots that can shoot hoops and balance on a teeter-totter type bridge. Each round is only a few minutes, and six robots at a time compete for the balls and the bridges.

Skyline’s robotics program is in its fourth year. Students pushed hard to keep the program alive this year. They had to find a teacher willing to oversee the club and engineers to mentor them.

“It was too great an opportunity to mess up,” said team captain Michael Lee. “It teaches us a tremendous amount of engineering.”

Boeing put up the $5,000 entry fee, and the Issaquah Schools Foundations provided about $6,000 for materials, which was still a few grand short of the cost.

During the second round, Talbot watches the robot sit motionless, while others compete around it. Their quick fix didn’t work.

After the round, the team rushes to a work station and begins unscrewing parts. A botched wiring job burned out two motors.

Colin Miller, a Microsoft employee who teaches one class at the high school, watched about 15 students swarm the bot, saying, “It’s like the pit crew of Nascar.”

When the students started designing the robot a few months ago, they didn’t know how to draft a design or order parts. They had never taken shop class and couldn’t even use a hack saw, said mentor Dave Levin.

By the fourth round, the students had fixed and tested their bot. It could move and shoot hoops, although its arm for lowering bridges would never work.

At the ring of another buzzer, the Spartabots miss their first shot, then the second flies over the backboard. They still don’t have any points.

Talbot scrambles to get another ball as time melts off the clock. Teams start balancing on the bridges, a sign the round is almost over, when he makes one last attempt at a basket – and makes a two point score. The team jumps in excitement.

Although they ranked near the bottom at the end of the weekend, that moment came with a great sense of accomplishment.

“It was pretty awesome,” Talbot said, “getting (the robot) to do what we wanted.”

Michael Lee makes last minute adjustments to his robot before a competition March 23.

Students competed in two arenas at the FIRST Robotics Competition March 23. Skyline, Issaquah and Liberty high schools each sent teams.

From the left, Daniel Wilson, Arjun Narayanan, Bhavya Chhabra and Blake Talbot roll their bot from the competition arena March 23.