Robotics Teams Test Their Wits, Machines

Get ready to ruuummble . . . robot style.

The preseason of high school robotics competitions kicked off at Woodside High School on Saturday with a tournament drawing about two dozen teams from Northern California. The battle of engineering brains and robotic brawn even beckoned a team from Los Angeles, which stunned spectators with ``Yoda'' -- its student-built robot that wielded a mighty powerful metal ``light saber.''

The fourth annual California Robot Games, sponsored by the Western Region Robotics Forum Inc., gave robotics team rookies a chance to navigate their schools' bots through obstacle courses and sumo wrestling matches. It was good practice, their more experienced teammates said, for the fierce square-offs that will take place in the spring at tournaments put on by For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST. And there were plenty of kinks to work out. ``Our robot died,'' said Steven Schlansker, a sophomore at Los Altos High School. Wires snapped, a wheel locked, and a hand-drill motor went kaput in the middle of a match.

``This is the first time we had parts broken,'' said Schlansker, 15. The team had lugged tools along, but not spare parts.

FIRST holds high school robotics competitions annually across the country, and the games have proven intensely popular among Silicon Valley students. Saturday's tournament included teams from Woodside, Los Altos, Monta Vista, Gunn, Bellarmine, Willow Glen, Lincoln, Saratoga, Menlo-Atherton, Aragon, Lynbrook, Harker and Milpitas high schools.

Dean Kamen, the physicist and engineer who invented the Segway scooter, founded FIRST as a non-profit organization in 1989. His celebrity status among robotics students could be seen with one look at the Los Altos High team's uniforms: lab coats with Kamen's autograph.

And his idea of inspiring students to stretch the boundaries of how to build a robot from a standard set of parts could be seen in the array of creations. A sleek silver one looked like an expensive VCR. A wooden robot trimmed with mustard-colored upholstery resembled a barnyard chair.

The teams tested their wits and their robots in the gymnasium ring, a rectangle divided by a ramp stacked high with 70-liter plastic bins. Students strategized as they maneuvered several joysticks to make their machines zoom up and down the ramp, ramming into other robots and pushing bins onto the opposing team's colored carpet in less than two minutes. Players finished each of their seven qualifying rounds with shouts, stomps or stunned silence. In between rounds, many teams retooled their robots in hopes of making it to the semi-finals and winning the trophy: a framed, matted silicon wafer.

``So far, we've had bad luck,'' Shrenik Shah, a Monta Vista junior, said, 3 1/2 hours into the competition. ``Last round our robot -- we didn't switch it on . . . by accident. The round before, we got disqualified.'' A few minutes later, Monta Vista and its match teammate, Lincoln High, won a round against Menlo-Atherton and Palo Alto's Gunn high schools. It was a close call, with the score ending at 33 to 32. After several robot malfunctions and overtime matches dragged the tournament out for an extra two hours, San Jose's Lincoln High wound up as one of the three first-place winners. Each round was agonizing, but they were less stressful than the six weeks students spend building their bots.

Lynbrook High senior Nathan Zheng recalled being ``short on sleep, short on food, short on everything.'' The 16-year-old said he went straight to the machine shop after school ended at 3 p.m. and often stayed there until 3 a.m. That meant he nibbled on instant noodle soup and vending machine snacks for dinner -- if he ate at all.

But the hard work paid off. He gave high-fives to teammates after they triumphed over yet another match. What were they going to do next? Zheng replied: ``We're going to eat lunch.''

Robots invade Woodside High

High schoolers battle it out in Robot Games

WOODSIDE -- The competition was fierce in the Woodside High School gym on Saturday. The players were pushed into the ring and proceeded to battle their opponents for the win. But all emerged with no more than a scratch.

That's probably because the players were robots and their proud creators -- high school students from around the state -- had already put in weeks of work to bring these sturdy demolishing machines to life.

Hundreds came out for the 2003 California Robot Games, hosted for the first time at Woodside High. Each robot -- there were more than 20 -- was designed to complete a variety of tasks, from knocking over stacks of plastic bins to staying within a designated path.

Aragon and Woodside high schools were the only County presence at the competition. The Aragon team was ecstatic come mid-afternoon, when they placed sixth after one particularly grueling round of competition. Woodside's home team ran into a few mechanical problems earlier in the competition, but team member Lindsay Steinfeld said the "power and traction" advantage still gave them an edge.

There was no shortage of action in the "pit" or staging area, either, as teams worked tirelessly on last-minute tweaks. "Everyone usually works until the last minute," Steinfeld said. "That's sort of expected."

Teams have six weeks to build their own robots, doing all the designing, mechanical and programming work themselves. The average budget for a classroom-sized first-year team participating in one regional competition is $10,000, event coordinators said. The price is usually increased after factoring in costs for travel and lodging, team T-shirts and extra parts.

Schools are able to participate in the competition through local and corporate sponsors and plenty of fund-raising. Valerie Taylor -- a Palo Alto mom with three kids who've been in the competition -- said that the event is more than just a showcase for mechanical and programming skills, noting the extensive community outreach involved in fund-raising. "It's really more than just computer-programming nerds," Taylor said.