February 1, 2013 at 5:29 p.m.
RHS robots prepare for battle
RHS robots prepare for battle
Split into two teams, club members spent time after school Thursday making the final preparations to their respective robots in anticipation of the First Tech Challenge to be held in Milwaukee this weekend.
This isn't the Battle Bots that some may remember from their childhood. There will be no robotic combat, but instead each robot will have to face another robot in a obstacle course to see which one can collect the most rings spread throughout the course.
The event is split into three sections.
First, there's a 30- second autonomous round in which the robots operate based on their programming alone as they try to collect the rings.
After that round, the students get to take the controls for two minutes to continue to collect as many rings as possible.
Finally, there's the End Game, where teams get points for how high their robot can lift the opposing robot off of the ground.
"It's a little bit like Battle Bots where each team is given a set of rules that they have to abide by and it's kind of like an obstacle course where they have to do certain things, both autonomously with the robot by itself and also by programming it with controllers to enable it to maneuver through the course," advisor Mike Wojtusik said.
As for the students, emotions range from nervous to excited, and everything in between, going into the challenge.
"It's exciting, but I'm really nervous about how we're going to do there. Hopefully, we'll do well," junior Max Rich said.
Others are not only excited about competing, but curious about what other teams will bring to the table.
"It'll be fun. We're going to be going up against who-knows-what, so at a minimum, we'll get to see what other people did and at best, we'll get to see what our robot can do against theirs. We'll see how it goes," freshman Adam Engel said.
And then there are those who just want to see what their creations can do.
"Actually, I'm more nervous than anything. As for our robot, I'm confident that it will stay together, though I don't know for sure that it will win, but we put everything we had into it, so no matter what, we're very proud of it," junior Markus Erdelles said.
The robot club is a new offering at RHS.
"This is our first year. It actually wasn't our idea, but it was one of our student's mother's idea. The student really wanted to get involved in robotics and engineering because that's what he wants to do and his mother stepped forward and essentially got the team started and gave us a pretty good sum of money to get it going. I was asked by our principal to do the advising. We got enough kids to get it started and here we are," Wojtusik said.
The other club members had a variety of reasons for joining.
Some are looking to the future.
"I'm interested in robotics and possibly going into college for working with robotics so I thought this would be a good place to start," Rich said.
Some are continuing a trend started when they were younger.
"I was probably 10 or so when I got a LEGO robot and I had a ton of fun building that so I wanted to see if I could build anything better than that. I want to do aircraft design in college so this should help with that," Engel said.
Others simply want to get together with others and work on something fun.
"I joined the club because I have always aspired to build electronics and work with machinery so I guess this worked out for me. I personally have taken programming classes, advanced electronic circuit classes, and I'm now taking a class on how to build engines. But my real goal is to get a sense of teamwork out of this. I classify (myself) as a nonsocial worker. When I work, I don't like working with other people so I'm trying this so I can work better with other people," Erdelles said.
Wojtusik is really proud of his students.
"It's amazing. We've got a real good core group of kids. There's about five or six of them out there where this is essentially what they've done for the last nine weeks, just concentrate on building their robot. Their intelligence level is beyond what I would believe a kid this age could have. It's really exciting to see them grow into it," Wojtusik said.
"I hope that we have a team next year."
Marcus Nesemann may be reached at [email protected].
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