Been there, done that: CU robotics club mentors IHS team champions

Ithaca High School student members of the Code Red 639 team celebrate their win in the 2004 FIRST Robotics super regional competition near Toronto, April 3, as their robot, nicknamed "The Red Tulip," clinches the win by hoisting itself on an overhead horizontal bar. Courtesy of Vicki Niebrzydowski

By Bill Steele

What goes around comes around.

Every year, mechanically minded high school students all over the United States and Canada compete in the FIRST (For the Inspiration of Science and Technology) Robotics competition, building and programming robots and entering them in regional and national game-playing competitions. And middle-school students have the FIRST Lego League, a competition to program off-the-shelf Lego robots.

As you might expect, some of these high school students end up studying engineering at Cornell. A few of those students decided to give back to the next generation and have formed the Cornell FIRST Robotics Club, to help provide mentoring to Ithaca High School's FIRST Robotics team and a Lego team organized at Ithaca's Sciencenter. The high school team is sponsored by Borg-Warner Automotive and Innovative Dynamics Inc., and some of their engineers also offer advice.

The group saw its work pay off this year as Ithaca High's team, known as Code Red 639, won the Canadian super regional competition in Mississauga, Ontario, April 1-3, and the Sciencenter's Lego team took the second-place programming award in their competition at Pace University in Pleasantville, N.Y., Feb. 8. The high school team currently includes 25 students, with Ithaca High School technology teacher Michael Peters as their adviser. The Sciencenter Lego team started this year with six students.

"Most of us have been involved in our own high schools or have been friends of people who did it," explained Vicki Niebrzydowski '04, president of Cornell's FIRST Robotics Club. The club started four years ago, she said, with Patrick Dingle '04, who helped to organize the first Ithaca High School team and eventually brought in other Cornell students. In the fall of 2001, the Cornell club was formally registered as a student organization, and it now has "about 10 members," Niebrzydowski said. Daisy Fan, assistant professor of computer science, is the faculty adviser.

More than 800 teams participate nationwide and internationally in 23 regional events and a championship event. The competitions are sponsored by FIRST, an organization dedicated to motivating young people to pursue opportunities in science, technology and engineering.

This year's high school competition involved a complex game played on a 24-by-48 foot field. A number of four-square balls are scattered on the field, along with a couple of very large balls. The robot, which operates partly on its own programming and partly under radio control, must gather up as many of the balls as possible and deliver them to human team members standing at the end of the field. The humans shoot the balls into baskets on the field, and then the robot must pick up the large balls and use them to "cap" the baskets. Finally, the robot must proceed to the center of the field where a horizontal bar has been placed 10 feet above the floor. The robot must reach up, grasp the bar and pull itself up off the floor. The Ithaca team handled ball-gathering with a very simple set of wings on the base of the robot that allowed it to gather and herd several balls at a time, and it aced the pull-up with a pneumatically driven scissor mechanism.

Although they lack both time and money to enter the national championship competition, the high school team is preparing to enter the Pennsylvania Area Robotics Challenge on May 8. Meanwhile, Fan said, Cornell FIRST Robotics is hoping to organize a second Lego team.