The Arvada High School Reds Robotics Team knows all about pressure.
With only a few days left, the group charged with designing, building and operating a robot still had much to do before its deadline.
A working robot must be shipped to FIRST Robotics Colorado Regional Competition organizers by Feb. 20.
On Feb. 9, with only nine days of building left, Reds Robotics team advisor Darryl Lusk gave a stern warning and reminded the 31 students in the class about just how much work still needed to be done.
“Why am I putting the pressure on now? Your deadline is only nine days away,” he said. “What does the robot look like now? It looks like a mix between a chicken coop and a King Soopers shopping cart.”
Since Jan. 9, the Reds Robotics team has been designing and building a robot to compete against 48 other student-built robots during the regional competition March 31 at the University of Denver.
The goal of each robot is to score the most points by either launching or dropping rubber balls through holes around an enclosed playing field.
Scattered in pieces around the team’s workshop, the robot was far from ready for competition.
Long hours of hard work after school lay ahead for the team.
“At this point you can’t launch a ball unless you find an elf on the side of the road and put it in your machine,” Lusk joked. “In theory you can, but we haven’t yet built a machine that can break the force of gravity.”
At the end of the lecture, the group of sophomores, juniors and seniors enthusiastically ran from their classroom into the adjoining workshop where the various parts of their robot awaited them.
“We are feeling the pressure and starting to worry, all we have done is the ball harvester and the robot chassis,” said Sarah Le, 16, who works on programming the robot. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Despite the pressure, the students remain confident that come shipping time their robot would be ready to take on the fiercest competition.
This is the second year of competition for the Reds Robotics team. Last year the team placed third out of 38 teams and received the Motorola Best Robot award.
Arvada is the only school in Jefferson County taking on the project.
Class teacher and advisor Lusk said the class teaches a variety of engineering skills that directly transfer to the real world.
“Whether you win the competition or not, these applications will allow you to do something many people in this world can’t ever do, build something with your own hands from scratch,” Lusk said to the class.
The team was issued a basic set of parts for the robot at the start, but must collect all additional parts from donations or out of their own pocket.
Lusk has already spent $300 of his own money on the robot, with other bot-material coming from area businesses.
Each group of students has a different task and a different set of challenges, while building the robot — from figuring out how to launch a ball several feet in the air to learning how to program the machine so it drives properly around the competition field.
While working on the ball hopper, the part of the robot that will store rubber balls until either shooting or dropping them into the goal, the hopper group had trouble agreeing on just what design should be followed. After about a 20-minute argument crowded around a dry-erase board, the group finally agreed on a design.
Little confrontations like these are just part of the project, Lusk said, and all part of the real world experience.
But through the arguments and designing roadblocks, 16-year-old John Rollins seemed confident that the project would come together by Feb. 20.
“I’m a little worried we won’t get everything to look nice and work to capacity, but I am sure we will compete,” Rollins said. “We look at all of our victories one thing at a time. Once we get a part done we can say, ‘Oh yes, we got there.’ It is complicated, but we will get it done.”