Published: March 10, 2007 08:51 pm      

Local team successful in robotics event

NEW ORLEANS, La. — To most students, competing in an extracurricular activity at shchool could mean many hours of boring practice.

But, to the local high school students that have chosen to participate in robotics, it means hours of engineering and problem solving practice that could be carried over into the real world.

Pearl River Central’s team CHAOS came to the Big Easy over the weekend to put their skills to the test in the first ever Bayou Regional Competition. The team is comprised of high school students from Picayune Memorial High School and Pearl River Central High School.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology is a NASA sponsored competition that centers around technology and engineering, two facets of the work force that need young ideas and minds. To increase awareness in the need for new blood in those fields the competition involves high school students of today. This is done in the hopes of inspiring those great minds of tomorrow by challenging them to build a robot and use it to compete in a unique game each year.

This year the Bayou Regional held a unique welcoming ceremony where FIRST staff and judges celebrated the competition fat Tuesday style via a parade complete with NASA and FIRST inspired throws.

After the ceremony took place teams headed to the competition floor to demonstrate what six weeks of hard work can produce.

This year’s competition theme was Rack and Roll where the objective is to place inflatable rings on a three tiered rack located in the middle of the playing field. Points were earned when alliances, or a set of teams, form vertical and horizontal rows of team colored rings on the rack.

Pearl River County’s own Team 1421, Team CHAOS, were first up for the competition with five other teams. During that first match CHAOS placed three tubes for their alliance while other teams in their alliance helped to score points. In the end their alliance scored 44 to 0.

In their second attempt CHAOS could not score with rings due to rival robot interference but they were able to lift their robot via team work with an alliance member, earning the alliance an extra 15 points. Their alliance ended that match with a score of 17-16.

The third attempt for the day earned them another win with a score of 8-2 but the CHAOS robot was able to place only one tube. Team CHAOS did set their robot up to lift an alliance robot, but a broken chain restricted the movement of the alliance robot and kept it from lining up.

When the Picayune Item left Team CHAOS was in first place but there was still a day and a half of competition left. To ensure maintaining that lead the team made minor arm alterations to help the robot grip the tubes a little better.

To ready themselves for the competition Team Chaos was able to get their robot assembled in about five weeks, leaving them time to practice and make some last minute alterations, said NASA engineer and Team CHAOS mentor Chris Olive.

“There were a lot of teams still building when they got here,” Olive said.

Construction of the robot was kept simple for two reasons, to avoid mechanical failures later on and to ensure the students would be more involved in the building process, Olive said. Students were involved with about 50 percent of the building process, he said.

“We designed it for simplicity and durability,” Olive said. “Keep it simple is our philosophy.”

To practice with the team built a practice rack that was about a quarter of the size of the official competition rack, Olive said.

Team funding was raised via selling space on the robot for advertising, CHAOS member Chris Bossier said.

Matthew Sheffield said the arm that is used to place rings was the last part added to the robot. Initially the robot was intended to block and lift two more robots off the ground at the end of the match for bonus points. However since they had a little more time to work on it they decided to add the arm.

In fact the ingenuity that went into the robot did not go unnoticed. Two judges, Christine Powell and Andrew Baker were impressed with the work the team did. Powell said she was impressed with the quality of work while Baker recognized the quality of mentorship that was shown. Baker noticed how knowledgeable the team seemed to be about their robot.