Programming a Win

There were three seconds left on the clock at the New York-New Jersey Regional RoboCupJunior rescue event as the robot inched along. If it could just finish scaling a short ramp, the NMH robotics team would earn 50 points. Students held their breath. The clock ticked. The robot scooted forward and…slipped back down again.

“It was like a basketball game where you have two seconds on the clock and you have to shoot a three-pointer,” said Andrew Byun ’12, who co-founded the NMH Robotics Club in January 2011 with Yifei Gao ’13.

“Our robot didn’t make it,” added Gao with a sigh. Then he grinned. Despite the slip, the Robotics Club still pulled out a first-place finish in the rescue event, one of three categories at the RoboCupJunior competition.

The team also went undefeated in the two-on-two soccer category, where the robots had to sense an infrared-lit ball, move to intercept it, and send it winging back to the other goal.

Winning two of three categories (the club didn’t enter the robot dance portion of the competition) is quite a feat for a group that formed a mere four months ago—and whose members spent the night before the competition rebuilding the rescue robot in Byun’s dorm room. In order to compete, members had to build and program three autonomous robots for events that would test their agility, speed, and ability to recognize obstacles.

“I told them in January, if you follow through with this, I’ll take you to the [RoboCupJunior] event,” said science teacher Hughes Pack, who knew Byun and Gao from their membership in the science club, which he advises.

NMH administrators gave the club $2,200 to buy the robotics equipment; club members spent spring break building and programming the machines. On April 10, ten members of the group—Byun, Gao, Kelsey Deng ’11, Ko Dokmai ’11, Kemeng Fan ’13, Brian Han ’12, Jason Hua ’12, Jeff Liu ’11, William Yu ’12, Harry Zeng ’12—traveled with Pack and science teacher Craig Hefner to the RoboCupJunior competition.

Although they had already built and programmed two robots for the soccer round robin and one robot for the rescue event, the students still had to work on recharges, repairs, and reprogramming throughout the event, Pack said. Most of the eight minutes allotted for the rescue mission, for example, was devoted to figuring out how to get the NMH robot around such obstacles as a heavy rock and deep shadows.

“They weren’t obsessed with winning. They were obsessed with having the robot complete the task they wanted it to complete,” Pack said. “I’ve never seen kids so excited and focused about anything, ever.”

Gao and Byun are already thinking ahead to next year, when they want the club to enter other competitions or perhaps host one of its own. Having placed first in the regional RoboCupJunior competition, the team is now waiting to hear if they will be invited to compete in the 2011 international RoboCupJunior competition in Istanbul in July.