The advent of 3-D printers has given even amateur designers and inventors the ability to create projects like never before.
As students with the West Hawaii Explorations Academy prepare to go head-on against the world’s most creative high school robotics teams this week, they have the student-designed printer — plus a huge dose of their own ingenuity — to thank for numerous parts and pieces of a man-sized robot they hope will carry the day at the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship in St. Louis starting Thursday.
In contention will be a forklift robot on wheels that must lift, carry and stack totes and recycling containers and clean up litter. Components ranging from sliders to gears were manufactured on a printer in the WHEA robotics lab, the same machine the team used to develop a prosthetic hand which they presented earlier this year to a 3-year-old girl in Honolulu. That hand and other prosthetic limbs, plus a self-sustaining business plan, earned the team the entrepreneurship award at the regional FIRST in Hawaii Robotics Competition in late March.
The team is in the process of creating another, more complicated, hand for a 5-year-old in Montana.
Naia North, a sophomore who is chief engineer for the robotics team, wrestled for days with the design, fabrication, installation and ultimately the redesign of a gear box that powers the lift for the competing robot. The worm drive required the transfer of power through shafts set at 90 degree angles. The gears wore down, failed repeatedly and had to be replaced.
“It was a great experience but it was so frustrating,” said North, who received the Dean’s List Finalist Award for her work.
Once in St. Louis, the team will have just three hours to make final adjustments to the robot to meet the parameters of the competion, dubbed “Recycle Rush.” Robots must perform maneuvers on their own, then operate under student control as they race to stack more totes higher than the competition.
The event tests teamwork, ingenuity and the ability to adapt.
Since it began attending FIRST Robotics competitions in 2011, the WHEA team has designed and built the 3-D printer, an underwater exploration vehicle and alternative energy projects, and explored vision processing.
Besides attending the four-day event, the team will visit the IDEA Labs at Washington University, an incubator for bioengineering design and entrepreneurship.
The team has raised $5,000 toward the $13,000 cost of the trip.
“We have to raise $8,000 to get the team to go and show what they have in front of the whole world,” said Valerie Delahaye, a member of WHEA’s board of directors. “I’m so proud of these guys for qualifying. They’re a young team — only five years old.”
Despite the economic challenge, a five-student team is planning on making the trip, robotics instructor Liana White said. The WHEA robotics program has about 30 students in total. WHEA is a science-focused and outdoor-oriented public charter school with 250 students in grades six-12.
The WHEA gofundme site can be found at gofundme.com/r8z5d5drc.