 |
|
| Thirty-four of the 36 students who make up Clinton High School's First robotics team cluster on the full-size practice playing field they built in a Nypro corporation warehouse. Their near-winning entry, Gael Force, stands in the center. Even at the high school level, robots don't come cheap: Of the $3,500 robot-building budget to which all teams are limited, Clinton devoted $3,231 to Gael Force. They spent another $2,500 to create the indoor practice field. |
|
As Kamen rolled away on his Segway-he goes everywhere on it-I wandered, amazed, on the floor of the Houston stadium. It was a gonzo-chic celebration complete with costumes, face paint, nutty booth displays (for some reason, stuffed monkeys were a recurring motif), raucous music, and the excitement of a football game, all in the service of sophisticated engineering. Shouting over the din, kids in the pit area showed off complex transmissions, photoelectric tracking, and even inertial guidance systems on their robots. Several made the point that at First the emphasis is on "gracious professionalism" rather than winning; teams routinely lend labor, parts, even whole robots, to one another.
"At the Lone Star Regional, one team's robot was shipped upside down," said Tonya Scott, an adult mentor to the team from Oklahoma's Ponca City High School. "It arrived in a thousand pieces. Every team in the building converged on that pit to fix it."
I strolled on, turning left at the Lost in Space robot, right at the guy dressed like a hammerhead shark, then stumbled across the Clinton High team for the first time. Most other teams had a theme: hard hats, love beads, purple hair. Not the Clinton delegation. Matching green T-shirts was as wacky as they got. But there was a giddy joy in the Clinton High pit. While other teams emitted a positive vibe, this one was in engineering ecstasy, constantly-compulsively-tinkering with their robot between matches. The diligence and devotion paid off: Their robot got the better of powerhouse NASA-coached robots before failing in the divisional semifinals to a
formidable bot backed by both DaimlerChrysler and General Motors.
"We're having so much fun, it's awesome," said Kate Murray, whose father, mother, and brothers were active in First. "It gets better
and better every day with every match."
It's been a lousy half century for Clinton, Massachusetts. Located 50 miles west of Boston on the south branch of the Nashua River, with a population of some 13,000, Clinton was once a booming textile hub; the carpets of the Bigelow Carpet Company once graced the White House and the SS Titanic. But the business of making rugs-not to mention tweed, lace, shoes, and wire fencing, all of which rolled out of Clinton by the ton early last century, slipped away to China and India. The Bigelow plant closed in the 1940s; today its massive redbrick facade dominates a fraying downtown of pizza parlors and discount stores.
Industry hangs on in the form of Nypro, a plastic-parts manufacturer that has filled the old Bigelow shell with gleaming machines that spit out pens, medical tubing, and cell phone cases. After hours, the company turns over its machine shop to the First students from Clinton High. With Nypro engineers as mentors, the students gather every night and weekend from December to April, planning, hammering, bolting, testing, and refining their dream machine. I dropped by one Saturday in February-prototype day.
As the popularity of First has grown over the years, so, too, have the ambitions of its student contestants. In 1992 the robots were shoebox size, tethered to controllers, and required to pluck tennis balls from a bed of dried corn kernels. Nowadays the robots weigh more than many of the kids (the maximum limit is 130 pounds, and most robots barely make it), are wireless, can be customized with parts bought on the open market, and face a fiendishly complex array of challenges. In 2004 robots won points for knocking a 13-inch ball off a tee, scooping up and delivering 13-inch balls to a human player to toss into a basket, topping the basket with a 30-inch ball, and hanging from a 10-foot-high bar. To heighten the challenge, the robots were required to work autonomously for the first 15 seconds of each two-minute match; only then could two team members commence remote-control piloting.
The Clinton students divided into a half-dozen groups and made concept models of various robot parts-the ball gobbler, the bar grabber, and the like. In the early 1990s, the Clinton team was content to create prototypes out of duct-taped cardboard. Now they design many components with SolidWorks software, the same computer-aided-design program that Nypro uses to create its elaborate fabricating machines, and they build with steel, industrial-grade plastic, and aluminum.
"We're working on a way to wrap a wire around the bar so the robot can hang from it," Andrew Grady, one of the mentors, said.
"How does the wire reach the bar in the first place?" I asked. Grady paused. "That's the tricky part."
While one subgroup developed a prototype of a vacuum-powered ball grabber, another worked out an articulated chassis that could climb a six-inch-high platform-one of the obstacles on the playing field-like an inchworm scaling a leaf. A third group built a sophisticated six-wheel omnidirectional drive. "It can move sideways without turning," said Angel Martinez, a slim, fast-talking sophomore. "Quicker and more efficient."
Watching the prototypes roll, grab, and gyrate, I began to wonder if towns, like people, have ingrained propensities, a sort of municipal DNA. Maybe the drive for engineering excellence that helped the old Clinton prosper never died.
"When your idea works, it feels like you just won the Boston Marathon," Janelle Donnini, 14, said with a huge smile.
"It's just wicked exciting," said Gena Bevilacqua, 16.
To an adult bystander, the community that formed around this engineering challenge was more striking than the technical feat. "It's like
my daughter has 35 brothers and sisters," said Jannine Bevilacqua, nodding at her daughter Gena. "This program has made her selfconfidence blossom. She waits all year for the next season to come."
One weekend during prototype season, Amy Weeks, a freshman in chemistry at MIT and possibly the first Clinton student ever to attend that university, stopped by the machine shop to visit her former teammates. She is slight and soft-spoken and still amazed by the course her life has taken. "It just didn't occur to me to be in engineering before First, because I didn't think I was smart enough. The program showed me that, OK, I can do engineering. That made me realize that, OK, I can do anything."
Also striking is the bond forged between students in the program and the adults who volunteer to help them. As Dean Kamen predicted
when he dreamed up First, one emergent property of robot-building is hero realignment. |
