One of the best things I did in high school was participate in Robotics Club. The amount of wisdom and knowledge I gained from my time spent working with friends on robots greatly outshines what I got out of the standardized academic curriculum. The rules of the game changed each year, but in general, the objective was to score as many points as possible by moving certain things into certain places, all the while using robots built to very strict and seemingly arbitrary rules.

If I had to pick a single image to describe Robotics Club, I would have to chose this one. Here, one of (if not the most) intellectual members of my high school is being used to “demonstrate” the claw motion of our robot.

Of course, sometimes an attempt would be made to get some work done. Here, for instance, James and Riley are observing Taiki use a knife blade taped to an electric motor to cut through a cardboard box that a $2,000 projector is sitting on. I’m not a Mechanical Engineer, so I don’t question their methods.

What’s this? Is something useful being constructed?

Preliminary design of the bot that we worked on. The idea was to use that giant arm to grab bot-guy, who was sitting in a pit a distance away from the starting box, and take bot-guy to a different box on the other side of the game board. It worked surprisingly well for being built out of Lego parts.

If you think that looks like a Gameboy SP, you’d be thinking correctly. We used their CPU’s for all of the processing, and the buttons and screen for the debugging process. Instead of game cartrages though, we plugged in XBC units, which would control the hardware, such as servos, motors, a camera, infrared sensors, sonic sensors, light sensors, and other things. Also, the base that everything is mounted on is the same that the Roomba robotic vacuums, only we don’t get any of the electronics or sucking power.

Gear ratios are made of pure awesome. Our flimsy little Lego bot is able to pick up a ~1Lb object from about 20 inches away.

This is the other bot that the rest of our team was responsible for. I am proud to say that I had nothing to do with this atrocity.

The purpose of this bot was to collect inverted plastic cups, store them in the basket on the back of the robot, and then return to the starting base to score points. Originally it was supposed to cross over a narrow bridge to collect enemy cups as well, but I’m not sure it ever made that journey with success.

One of the biggest issues with our bot was battery life. We could only work for about 20 minutes on the standard batteries before losing too much charge for the mega lifting arm to be useful. So, we rigged together an awesome 12V lead-acid battery with a potentiometer and used that to power the iRobot and XBC. IIRC both operated at 7.2 (or 9.4?) volts, so it worked reasonably well, though as it turns out, our lead- acid battery was terrible at providing enough amperage to keep the mega arm + bot guy raised in the air. But at least that battery never died on us..

An action shot of the iRobot bot doing having its way with the enemies big blue ball. (We’re placing it in a scoring position on our side)

Onward to competition! We represent Carrollton/Farmers Branch, TX, but the regionals contest is held in Norman, Oklahoma. And yes, OU still sucks.

Is this a robotics competition? Or a conglomeration of cool people? It’s difficult to tell sometimes.

He is lost in thought staring at code. Or something.

Evil. Pure Evil.

Chaperons? Pfft. We were left to do as we pleased.

Running a simulation of how he’s going to look when he is older.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be an anti-social nerd boy to be in robotics.

I rarely get photographed, even less so with my own camera, but here’s one of myself as I prepare our bots to compete.

It’s hard to believe how much time, money, and effort goes into shuffling these guys around a 4×8 foot game board.