In the News: Robotics a learning experience

Alvin Yu, Anthony Farr and Michael Peterson, along with Tyler Krupicka, competed with a small robot similar to that held by Krupicka. Matt Greensmith (second from right) mentored all the teams about electrical and control systems while Nick Schmit machined the parts for the big robot.

Engineering — Two Newberg High School teams reflect on spring break competition

The robot appeared sturdy and well-fabricated and its mechanical claw, mounted on an elevator, was somewhat menacing. It was good that it looked mean, as it played a lot of defense and took its fair share of hits.
The robot was designed and built by Newberg High School students to compete in the FIRST challenge the last weekend of spring break. It was the second consecutive year the school has participated in the event, but the team was nearly all rookies as last year’s was mostly seniors.

This year’s game entailed two teams of three robots stacking tube pipes taken from a dispenser. Because there were some bugs in the operation of Newberg’s mechanical claw, “we played a lot of defense,” said Matt Greensmith, the team’s electrical and control system specialist. (His day job is in the school district’s IT department).

“A lot of those kids are coming from the shop class where they have machining skills,” Greensmith said and so for a lot of them the programming side was new. Nick Schmit, 18, who had assisted with the machining of last year’s robot, said that some of the parts were rather tricky to manufacture.

One piece that held the elevator mechanism to the base of the robot required the part to be machined once, then replaced very carefully in the machine in order to have its other side machined. “You have to tell the machine where the part is and it’s hard to do that accurately sometime,” he said.

Small plastic sliders also required a couple of trips through the CNC machine, Schmit said, as he discovered that they heated up during machining, thus expanding and no longer fitting in the grooves they had to run in.

Other students competed in other teams with smaller robots. Tiger Team 4586 made of Michael Peterson, 15, Anthony Farr, 16, Alvin Yu, 15, and Tyler Krupicka 15, learned that less is more. They won a regional competition but then faltered at the state competition after they made changes to their robot.

Peterson said the group tried to make too many changes to their robot after the regional. Farr said that they didn’t have the time to then debug all the changes they’d made, diminishing the robot’s performance.

They’ll keep plugging at it as they intend to compete next year. The smaller robots use the same kits year after year so they won’t have to start from scratch and if they’re successful in fundraising they’ll be able to add to their library of parts to increase the capabilities of their creation.

Laurent Bonczijk, The Newberg Graphic