Published: January 13, 2009 10:15 am         

Students face robot challenge

Area students are facing a robotics challenge designed to simulate what astronauts in the Apollo 11 mission experienced when they landed on the moon in 1969.

Local robotics groups are working to design robots for this year’s FIRST Robotics challenge, “Lunacy,” which kicked off Jan. 3. Students have six weeks to build a robot that can pick up 9-inch game balls resembling moon rocks and get them into trailers hitched to their opponents’ moving robots during matches on a low-friction floor that has the same traction someone would experience while walking on the moon.

Fifty teams from Oklahoma will eventually compete at a regional competition in Oklahoma City Feb. 26-28. This year’s challenge was created in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Harold Holley, U.S. FIRST Oklahoma Regional Director, said it was the most complicated and exciting challenge to date.

Students are working with a new industrial-quality control system, game balls that are difficult to manipulate and a moving target on a slippery floor, Holley said.

Thunderstorm Robotics, a group composed mostly of students from the Payne County Home Educators Home School, hosted a kick-off event at the Wes Watkins Center at Oklahoma State University on Jan. 3. Approximately 1,100 students from across the state attended the all-day affair.

Ron Markum, adviser for Thunderstorm Robotics, said this year’s challenge is completely different from years past, but it almost always is. His team and a team from Ponca City led a quick-build session to help less-experienced teams. Markum said about 30 teams walked away from the kick-off event with an operational robot.

Stillwater High School’s team, led by Debbie Short, left with a functional robot, which puts the group two weeks ahead of schedule, Short estimated.

The team formed last year and competed for the first time this fall. Short said students are still trying to figure out their strategy for the February competition. She said receiving help from more experienced teams at the kick-off was a big help.

“If we would have come home and opened up that stuff and tried to figure it out, it would have taken us so much longer,” she said.

     

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