Members of the Westerville Wild Warbots robotics team may have their eyes facing their laptops like many teenagers, but instead of Facebooking, they’re typing code and programming robots they build.
The team of 24 students from Westerville’s three high schools spends afternoons at Westerville Central High School, preparing for two competitions in March.
“This year, the competition is ‘Aerial Assist,’” says Jesús Aguilar-Rodriguez, the mechanical team leader. “You have two sides of a playing field and you have to pass an exercise ball between robots. A team can drop the ball in a one-point goal or shoot it in a 10-point goal, which is about six feet in the air.”
But the competition isn’t about building the best individual robot – it’s about creating the one most proficient at adapting.
“The objective isn’t about doing your own thing,” Aguilar-Rodriguez says. “It’s about being able to cooperate. The difference between cooperation and being on your own is the difference between one point and 10.”
Six weeks before the competition, each team receives a start-up kit from FIRST Robotics, the national high school robotics organization, and team members decide how they’re going to use their parts.
“The first week was super creative,” Aguilar-Rodriguez says. “We had six huge whiteboards and they were filled with our ideas. Everyone gives ideas and we try them out.”
Trial and error is one of the most important steps of the process.
“We tried suction with a vacuum cleaner and it wasn’t effective,” says team member Andrew Dunn. “We tried a forklift, but you had such a small area to receive the ball in. This would be too difficult in the competition.”
After building and planning with a few different prototypes, the group decided on its current robot, which can either pick the ball up with rotating frontal gears or launch the ball in the air with a catapult.
The Warbots work with Flood Heliarc Inc., a precision sheet metal fabrication and welding company in Groveport. Using computer-aided design, students created their model and sent the plans to the plant, which then manufactured the parts.
The student team assigned to electrical work wires all of the mechanical pieces together when the frame is completed.
“A computer-area network links the motors with cables, similar to Ethernet cables,” says Gary Jackson, spirit team leader and a senior at Central. “This is so you can get all four motors to turn in sync.”
Perhaps the most perplexing piece of the puzzle is the programming. The students type code into software to get the robot to function remotely.
“The programming team writes all the code for any of the components – anything that moves the motors, we work with,” Jackson says. “People who come in here with no programming knowledge will leave here knowing how to program a robot. Within the first couple days, we pass what you learn in the first couple months of classes at the high school level.”
The team’s robot was completed and shipped to the site of the competition by Feb. 15. This year, the students are fortunate enough to have two robots.
“We still get to practice with the other one,” says Leslie Baumann, team coach and English teacher at North. “We’ve taken a step up with development. A lot more kids are getting their hands on the robots now.”
The group is confident in its machine this year because it built a functional prototype. In 2013, the team wasn’t so lucky. When the robot went out for the competition, members weren’t sure if it would operate.
“It just stopped working,” Aguilar-Rodriguez says. “It wasn’t until the second qualification match that we got it to shoot (a disc). A lot of times, the disc would get stuck and it would fail. We were definitely sad.”
But the struggle came with a silver lining. The Warbots learned to improvise while on the road.
“We spent that weekend trying to problem-solve,” Aguilar-Rodriguez says. “The shooter wouldn’t work, so we built another and put it on at the competition. But then, we needed a net so we could play defense. I ended up staying up the night before, knitting a net in my hotel room.”
Despite this roadblock, the team found success at the Dublin invitational this past year, but not without some more trouble.
“We had a shooter that could throw it up and into the goal, but we broke down a bunch of times,” says Aguilar-Rodriguez. In the final match, we only had three wheels running and we still ended up winning.”
The team is mostly self-funded, but received $2,000 from the school district.
“This can be very expensive – it’s about $15,000 for the team,” Baumann says. “We are responsible for coming up with the rest through grants and sponsors. We’ve received $5,000 from NASA and funding from AEP.”
And even though the team gets a little help from parental volunteers, it’s the students who do the majority of the work.
“The beauty is the student leadership,” Baumann says. “They come up and implement all the ideas and they type all the code. They teach each other all the time.”
The Warbots are in their fourth year, and many members are considering engineering as a future profession.
Stephan Reed is an editorial associate. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
