HILO — Students from seven Big Island schools were scheduled to fly to Honolulu this morning to face off against 1,000 other students from around the world in this weekend’s Fifth Annual Hawaii Regional Robotics Competition.
Each year, the competition involves a different sporting event that must be performed by a robot. Teams are notified six weeks before the competition on what tasks their robots will be required to perform. This year, the competitors will compete in a “Rebound Rumble,” played between two alliances of three teams each. Alliances play by trying to put as many basketballs through a hoop as possible during the two-minute and 15-second match.
Students on the Waiakea High School team, which is one of the most established and accomplished teams in the state, think they’ve got a winning strategy this year.
“A lot of teams are trying to shoot the basketballs,” said one of the team’s teachers, Dale Olive. “We found that that isn’t very accurate. Instead of shooting, our students built a long arm that will allow us to dunk the ball.”
Known as the “Hot Rocks,” the Waiakea team consists of between 20 and 25 students. A total of 14 will be flying to Honolulu for the contest, Olive said. They will be operating a robot dubbed “Stitch 7,” named after the popular Disney character from the movie “Lilo & Stitch.”
The driver of the robot will be 16-year-old junior Nick Winters, who also drove the team’s entry in last year’s competition. When you find someone that can handle the pressure, “you don’t switch quarterbacks,” Olive explained.
“It’s definitely a big responsibility,” Winters said Wednesday afternoon as his team met at the school one last time before heading to the competition. “After all the hard work, you don’t want to let the team down.”
Weighing around 120 pounds, the machines are complicated and chaotic-looking masses of aluminum, wires, gears, sensors and circuit boards. At first glimpse, it is clear that these machines are made to be utilitarian, not to look pretty.
Olive explained that such robotic competitions often have multiple ways for teams to score, and part of the challenge is for the students to decide how specialized their bots should be for certain tasks. They often have to sacrifice functionality at certain tasks to be better at others. This year, for instance, baskets will be set a different heights — 2, 4 and 8 feet. The higher baskets are worth more points. Because their machine can’t shoot the ball, Waiakea will be focusing on dunking the balls in the two lower hoops. They effectively sacrificed the highest scoring basket to ensure that they will have more consistent scoring overall, Olive said. Teams can earn bonus points if they are able to balance their robots on a bridge at the end of their match — a trick that the Waiakea team feels very confident about with their entry.
“If you try to do everything well, you’ll ending up doing nothing at all,” Olive said.
The experience of envisioning and then building a competitive robot is nearly priceless when it comes to preparing students for real-world engineering jobs, said the team’s other teacher, Eric Hagiwara. A representative from one team sponsor, BAE Systems, was so impressed with the students that he remarked “all these kids have jobs if they want when they get out of school,” Hagiwara said. “That’s how good they are.”
The true strength of the program, Olive added, is that it “merges book smarts and tool smarts in the kids.”
“Some kids are really, really book smart, but they’ve never had to put anything together with their hands and using tools,” he said. “Our kids are rock stars.”
The Waiakea team will be joined by six other Big Island schools, including Hilo, Ka‘u, Konawaena, Kealakehe, West Hawaii Explorations Academy and Kohala high schools, according to a spokesman with event organizer FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. They will converge on University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Stan Sheriff Center from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. beginning today and running through Saturday.
Competition sponsor FIRST is a not-for-profit organization founded by famed inventor Dean Kamen, the creator of such products as the Segway and the first drug infusion pump. For more information on the competition, or to follow the scores of the teams as the weekend progresses, visit usfirst.org and hawaiiroc.org.