By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Two years ago, students were challenged to design and build a robot that could hang plastic inner tubes on hooks.
Last year, the robot needed to shoot foam balls into baskets.
Saturday morning, the Hillsborough High School RoboRaiders Team 75 learned via NASA satellite hookup that this year’s challenge was to make a 120-pound, 5-foot-high device that can throw Frisbee-like discs.
And, for extra points, it must climb an 8-foot metal pyramid.
Students all over the world found out about this year’s FIRST challenge in the initial step of an annual competition that challenges students on many levels. Some, like design, programming and mechanical, are obvious, but teamwork, safety, public relations and fundraising also are necessary.
The robotics competition by FIRST (an acronym of For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology) was organized in 1989 by entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway personal transporter.
The challenge was introduced to the team, parents and invited guests on a screen hung in the RoboRaiders’ donated warehouse in the Valley Park Business Center, off Route 206.
Immediately after the video ended, dozens of red-shirted Team 75 members scurried in different directions to analyze the rules and devise opening strategies in the game named “Ultimate Ascent.”
The challenge is an engineering challenge wrapped up in a sport-like competition. In competition, two teams will put their robots on the field at the same time in a two-minute match and gain points by throwing discs through rectangular openings on three levels. The higher the opening, the more points are scored.
The game ends with robots trying to climb one of two tripods in the middle of the field,. Again, the higher the climb, the more points. It’s all in spirited competition, but with restraint. The competition even gives an award to the team displaying the most “gracious professionalism.”
Saturday, the first emphasis fell on the strategy team, about 16 to 18 students who scrambled to a small room to log onto the program on their laptops, decrypt it (using the password “saucers fly, robots climb”) and begin learning the details of the workings of the robot, the field on which the game will be played and the rules and scoring.
Across the hall, the design team the “customers of strategy,” said junior Casey Moon were looking at the info, too, but waiting to hear from their teammates on how make the robot go, whether it needed to pull or pick up something and other essential movements.
Inside the main concrete block storeroom probably big enough to create a 27-foot by 54-foot practice field, the programming, electrical and mechanical teams also were musing for the first time on the challenge.
In a related competition, a safety animation team had scribbled on a whiteboard ideas, based on hints they had received, on how to develop a video for another phase of the competition.
Meanwhile, other students were picking up the kit of parts at Johnson & Johnson, the RoboRaiders chief sponsor in Montgomery.
After a pizza lunch, the students brought the conclusions and thoughts of the separate subteams to a brainstorming session. For the next six weeks, the RoboRaiders will work intensely to devise, build and perfect their entry.
Competitions (the first is on March 23) have become one of the highlights of the extracurricular year for the students, who, last year, were proficient enough to advance to the international competition in St. Louis.

