Hope Chapel students pilot robot to win
The Hope Chapel robotics team tinker with their creation, named 32, which they piloted to victory in a 58-school competition. Crouched in a tinkering arc are mentor and Raytheon engineer Ric Roberts, Seth Wightman, team leader and JPL engineer Rob Steele, mentor and CSULB engineering student Shane Palmerino, mentor and Raytheon engineer Joe Ross, Faith Steele, Tanya Borja and Caitlin David.
Hope Chapel students continued their dominance of competitions robotic, as they steered a low-slung, four-wheeled creation named 32 to victory in a frenetic, soccer-like tournament, vanquishing 57 other school teams from the greater Los Angeles area.
Hope Chapel Academy’s win in the FIRST Robotics competition at the Long Beach Arena marked its fifth regional title, to go along with a world robotics championship in 2005.
School mascots led cheers while about 1,000 spectators watched the Beach Bots team from Hope Chapel use remote-control joy sticks to pilot their 32 to victory in the finals. On a playing field with five other robots, 32 darted around the field of play, corralling soccer balls and “kicking” them toward a goal, and gained bonus points by using its single, vertical arm to hang from an overhead bar.
Each short, hectic match began with 15 seconds of “autonomous” play in which the robots used their programming and their sensors. That was followed by two minutes of remote-control play, in which a lead driver would steer and stop the robot while a second driver worked the kicking mechanism.
The Hope robot’s maximum speed was 7 feet per second.
Hope Chapel’s lead driver, 12th grader Faith Steele, a four-year veteran of the robot wars, said she had to keep her cool as she used two joy sticks to guide 32.
“It’s nerve wracking actually,” she said. “…If you freak out, you can’t drive the robot. I’m always a nervous wreck before and after the competition, but while it’s going on, I zone in and nothing else really gets in the way.”
During the tournament’s preliminary rounds, robots were randomly teamed with each other to play the fast paced game. The final round was all South Bay, pitting Hope Chapel against a team of students from Mira Costa and Redondo Union high schools.
The two teams each picked up two previously eliminated robots as teammates, and took the field, which was mined with obstacles such as a tunnel, a 15-inch embankment and barriers in the middle.
Nine balls were put into play, and the robots hummed along, shooting, playing defense and – if they could do it – hanging from the bar. The Hope Chapel team’s robot played near midfield, firing balls to a teammate that would push them into a goal from close range. The bar-hanging of 32 was aided by the simplicity of its arm, which went straight up, and had a perpendicular “hand” at the end to hook over the bar.
The Costa-Redondo team was the toughest Hope Chapel had faced.
“They put up a huge fight,” said Vice Principal Penny Ross. “We tied one match and we lost one match to them. They were a tough team to beat.”
The Redondo/Mira Costa students recently won a regional competition in San Diego, and at Long Beach they earned the Innovation in Control award sponsored by Rockwell Automation, while the Hope Chapel team earned the Industrial Design Award sponsored by General Motors.
“It’s been a very good year for South Bay robotics teams,” Ross noted.
She said the simplicity of 32’s design worked in Hope’s favor in Long Beach.
“We had one of the more simple machines there,” she said.
The more complex robots sometime fall prey to more mechanical complications and breakdowns, she said.
“We know from experience, simple is better,” Ross said.
Steele, who plans to major in computer science at Cal State Long Beach, said a number of students from other teams commented on 32’s bar-hanging arm, saying they had not thought of such a simple design.
The Hope Chapel team was sponsored by the Raytheon technology and defense company, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 32 robot was born after Hope Chapel students voted on two designs offered by their mentors, and then went out to buy a Fisher Price motor and other parts to build it.
While the other scholastic teams were often as large as 20 students, and sometimes as large as 50, the Hope team numbered only half a dozen.
“We all got to jump in and really work on it,” Steele said. “Everybody got to really work on the robot.”
The name 32 stuck after one of the mentors made a needle-in-a-haystack guess at the size of a chain that would be needed for the robot, and turned out to be correct.
Along with 32, the team built a “practice bot” that Steele drove around on weekends to stay sharp.
The team made use of two sons of Ross: Joe, a Raytheon engineer and previous Hope Chapel team member, and Andy, who is majoring in mechanical engineering at Cal State Long Beach.
Penny Ross said the robot competitions combine teamwork and strategy with science and engineering to interest the kids in math and science. FIRST (as in the FIRST tournament) is For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
Two weeks before the Long Beach tourney, the Hope Chapel team won a regional competition in Arizona, and earned the Excellence in Engineering Award sponsored by Delphi.
Next, the Hope team competes in the world robotics championship today through Saturday in Atlanta, where 500 robots will compete before an anticipated 10,000 spectators at the Georgia Dome. NASA will webcast the event at NASA.gov.
Matches from the FIRST tourney can be viewed at thebluealliance.net; the high-scoring second match of the finals is especially recommended. ER