 |
|
| Student teams begin with a standard kit of 300-plus parts (worth about $16,000) supplied by First. Clinton augmented theirs with specialized parts (shown here), many of which they designed and built themselves. |
|
"Jorge is a role model in my life," said Mike Murray, a senior. "I absolutely look up to him."
That would be Jorge Martinez, a Nypro engineer who has worked with the Clinton team for 12 years. "I think most teams will make a robot that can do just one or two things," he said, watching Joseph Parker grind down some transmission gears. "We're crazy enough to make a robot that does everything. We'll see how it works."
The homely robot that emerged from the design process last March sported an ingenious forklift-style ball lifter that doubled as a bar grabber, and it looked to be a contender. Late in the month, at a regional event in Hartford, Gael Force rumbled to a second-place finish out of 51 teams. In autonomous mode, directed by several thousand lines of C code in its microcontroller, it aced its mission: trundling some 15 feet, lifting its arms, pirouetting, and knocking a ball off a tee, a feat comparable to picking up a 7-10 split in bowling. Then the three human players-Kate Murray, Gena Bevilacqua, and Joseph Parker-would make it dodge, weave, pick up and disgorge balls, and finally hang from the bar, freestyle, with only moments to spare. The play was refreshingly civilized. The robots, which work in teams of two, concentrate on the tasks at hand, not on bashing each other.
"It isn't Battlebots," said Tom O'Connell, an adult volunteer.
And so it was with great expectations that the Clinton team left for the Atlanta nationals in April. Again I wandered the pit area in a daze, past themed teams wearing pink tutus, leopard suits, and T-shirts that read "Sleep is for the Weak." In a speech to the throng, Woodie Flowers, a dapper engineer from MIT who each year rejiggers the game rules with Kamen, emphasized that colleges and companies are ardently pursuing First's participants, doling out some 200 scholarships worth $4.9 million.
In just 12 months since the Houston nationals, the robots had made a leap in sophistication: One from the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science in Worcester could climb a six-inch platform, reach up, grab the bar, hang, and unfurl a protective cowling that kept other robots from hanging there-all in autonomous mode. Once again, poorer teams from farm towns and blighted industrial cities seemed to regularly outscore well-financed teams from metropolitan centers. Clinton brought down its largest-ever delegation: 35 students and 25 adults. As in the real world, there are no free rides; to qualify for the trip, each student had to put in long hours, often 80 or more, of robot-creating and had to help raise sponsorship money. For a town without much cash to spare, local businesses were accommodating. "It's not just us," said Gordon Lankton, the chairman of Nypro. "All of Clinton gets behind this team."
While the Clinton entourage watched and cheered from the stands, Gael Force did its thing, juking, jiving, and plucking its way into the two-minute quarterfinals match. The contest would pair Gael Force with a robot from Pontiac, Michigan, against a pair of robots from New Jersey and New York. At the starting horn, Gael Force, self-guided, whizzed onto the field and turned smartly toward the ball on the tee, but for the first time in three weeks and after dozens of matches, its arm snagged on a guardrail, and it failed to knock a ball off its mark. The robot recovered quickly in human-controlled mode, adroitly feeding balls to Kate Murray, who expertly fed them into a basket. The doughty robot then rumbled up to the 10-foot-high bar. With only 15 seconds left, Gael Force grabbed on and hoisted itself skyward. The claxon sounded, a cheer erupted, and Clinton looked to be on its way to the finals.
Then it happened. At the end of each match, the teams must cut power to their robots, and the hanging robots must remain aloft in order to score 50 points. When the juice drained from Gael Force, to the horror of the Clinton team, it slowly sank and touched the ground. Teams enter the quarterfinals in groups of three, from which they form varying two-team alliances for each quarterfinal match. When Clinton's two allies lost their matches a few minutes later, the season was over.
Afterward, inspecting Gael Force in the pit, the Clinton team located the problem. In snagging itself on the guardrail, the robot had sheared off a pin meant to lock its forklift arms and keep it hanging when its power was flicked off. "It's the race-car driver's lament," said Al Cotton, a public-relations officer with Nypro. "It's always the 25-cent part that kills you." The green-shirted Clinton team was subdued later that afternoon as they crated up Gael Force for the journey home. "It really isn't about winning," said Brad Kulis, the pit boss. "But it is nice to win." The gloom began to dissipate. Joseph Parker started gathering up tools and, sure enough, his old upbeat self.
"It sounds weird, but in the end, what happened in the match really doesn't matter," Parker said. "Everybody did what they were supposed to do. I still love every aspect of this." He planned to attend the University of Massachusetts at Amherst the following year to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering. Afterward, he just might come back to Clinton, invent something that can be manufactured there, and help the town recover its old, industrial, upbeat self. |
