Monthly Archives: March 2017

Five robotics enthusiasts from Sky View High will be taking a trip to the VEX Robotics World Championship in Louisville, Kentucky, next month after winning the state championship in Farmington last weekend.

Two teams from Sky View, along with a team from Davis County, will compete against 1,400 robotics teams from around the world including Australia, China and Canada over April 19 to 25. Utah is able to send three teams to the world competition, while bigger states like California and Texas send more students.

It is the world stage of Vex Robotics, Sky Robotics and Engineering Teacher Jared Storrs said.

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The Vex Robotics challenge is different each year. This years gameinvolved two teams robots flinging, pushing and shoving foam jacks and bean bags over a fence. The robots first use an autonomous mode, where robots move based on code, followed by a longer period where students control their robots using a remote similar to a video game controller.

Of the the 24 teams at the state competition, two of the three winners came from Sky View. The competition started with qualifying matches before teams chose alliances.

Kaledon Grandy, a ninth-grade student from North Cache Middle School who joined the Sky View robotics club, said his team was ranked 20 out of 24 in the qualifiers, but a strong team from Davis County picked both of the Sky View teams for their alliance. The three teams ended up winning the state championship.

They just played the game right and did well enough throughout the year that everybody kind of knew who they wanted for that final, Storrs said.

Grandy said his classmates are excited for him.

They think about sport teams, and if you go to states thats a big thing, and nationals is amazing, but worlds is really awesome, Grandy said.

This is Grandys first year in robotics, but he took a basic robotics camp over the summer and enjoyed the engineering aspect. He said he likes figuring out how to make something work and finding ways to create different types of motion.

You have to be able to look at a pile of scraps and turn it into something, Grandy said.

He said he has no idea what to expect at worlds, but he remains excited about the competition next month.

Im looking forward to seeing all the diverse teams from different parts of the world and seeing how we can all fit together in this simple little competition, Grandy said.

Excerpt from:

Sky View robotics wins state championship - The Herald Journal

First-year competitor Alysa Arthur is learning how to code with robots and she loves it.

Alysa is one of six students that make up the Junior Jackets Robotics Team at Wilson Middle School in Council Bluffs.

Coding is my favorite because when you code something you first see it on a computer and that makes the robot go somewhere else and you get to see what it does, Arthur said. I like that.

Her mom, Christy Arthur, spearheaded the first-year program, after she saw first-hand the opportunities her son, Seth, had on the robotics team at the high school level. (Alysa and Seths father is school board president Troy Arthur.)

It totally reshaped his world, she said. So I wanted to make sure these kids had it too.

When she first started working to bring the program to the middle school last year, Christy Arthur said there wasnt any funding available, so she and parent Matt Koletzke self-funded the program to get it off the ground.

Then additional support came their way after Thomas Jefferson High School robotics coach James Crum gave a spare robotics kit to the program. Christy Arthur and Koletzke then bought the additional tools needed to get started and asked T.J. computer science technology teacher Denise Hoag to sponsor the program.

Hoag agreed, joining the team last October.

Being its the first year, we are helping each other along the way, Hoag said. We learned how to pull out the rules and manual to learn specifically what we needed to accomplish for the judges. I keep telling them they paved the way, making it a little easier for those who want to join next year.

Today, six students comprise the program with students being split into two teams of three students each. Seventh-grader Alysa (seventh-grade) along with eighth-graders Chase Koletzke and Brandon Whitsel make up team 2501W. Sixth-graders Toby Mass, Blake Whitsel and Gracie Clark make up team 2501X.

The students meet twice a week after school learning science, technology, engineering and math concepts through hands-on robotic activities in their free time.

Theyre learning engineering skills with gears, motors and controllers and how they all go together to complete the task required for competition, Hoag said. They also have to program the robot to move autonomously, so they learn programming skills too.

While the students learn different STEM skills by interacting hands-on with robots, they also learn research and documentation skills through different projects provided by VEX, a company involved in middle and high schools across the country that helps students expand their understanding of STEM through robotics.

One program recently included completing a project related to robots in the community. Students visited Fox Run Assisted Living in Council Bluffs to demonstrate robotic pets, and the students received a huge response, Hoag said.

We held a spaghetti feed to fund raise and ended up purchasing four robotic companion pets to give them, Hoag added.

Having competed in three competitions so far this school year, the students continue to impress judges, earning top honors wherever they go. So far, the team has earned three top awards including an excellence, design and STEM award.

Most importantly, they learn how to work on a team, Hoag said. They learn how to collaborate and come up with ideas and try them out and see which one works the best,

On April 4, the team will head to the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs to compete at the U.S. Open Robotics Championship. Then team 2501W will head to Louisville, Kentucky, to compete against hundreds of other students in the VEX Worlds competition beginning April 24.

Its amazing how much theyve grown and learned in a small amount of time, Hoag said. To take the program from brand new and now going to the Worlds Championship demonstrates a great amount growth and learning.

While the program has since received funding from the AIM Institute to continue operating, the students dont have the funds needed to attend the Kentucky competition, which was described by one parent as the equivalent of making it to the Olympics.

So Christy Arthur is also spearheading a number of different fundraising efforts. On April 12, from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., Buffalo Wild Wings, located in the Metro Crossing Shopping Center, will host the team and donate 10 percent of sales when anyone that dines in mentions the fundraiser.

There will also be a bake sale today from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. at the Legislative Coffee held at Wilson Middle School. Those interested in donating, can also do so through the teams Go Fund Me account at gofundme.com/jrjackets2501.

Alysa Arthur said she will most likely continue to stay involved with robotics through college. Even though shell eventually leave Wilson, her mom plans on staying involved with the program.

Ill be working with the elementary schools to further this down, Christy Arthur said. For me, its not just robotics, it teaches STEM, teamwork, collaboration, research and documentation and a lot of honor through design. I think its a great program and it should be at every school, I started here and Im going to keep pushing until everyone sees the value I do.

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First-year Wilson robotics team kicks it into gear, continues to succeed - The Daily Nonpareil

Every Friday night when the clock strikes 7 p.m., dozens of students flood in to Mountain View High School to get back to work. Whether it's drilling, cutting or bending metal parts, designing software or working on electrical wiring, members of the school's Spartan Robotics team seem to have no problem committing the next five or six hours to tinkering when most students are more than happy to leave school behind for the weekend.

Whatever is driving students to commit countless hours to building a robot that can perform complex actions, both autonomously and with a remote control, it appears to be infectious. Over the last five years, Spartan Robotics has exploded in popularity, growing to a roster of 50 students, and now ranks among the top teams in the world. Even students and parents who have long since graduated out are sticking around for another season.

Spartan Robotics, affectionately referred to as Team 971 by the membership, participates in a global competition known as First Robotics, where students have just a couple months to design, build and test a robot -- normally the size of a dishwasher -- that can perform various actions to earn points. Among other things, this year's robot needs to be able to pick up a large number of Wiffle balls and launch them precisely into a bin.

If there was ever a way to expose students to all aspects of hands-on STEM education at the same time, the controlled chaos of work that goes on between January and March is pretty much it. Students are constantly engineering parts of the robot, creating prototypes -- some of which are rapidly re-designed or replaced -- and writing up software that allows the robot to function on its own using sensors. The team relies on mentors, many of whom are parents and returning students, to guide it and ensure that a robot is complete, bagged and ready to go in time for the first competition.

"It's really exciting, especially this early in the season," said Chris Mintz, a third-year member of Spartan Robotics, during a frenzied day of work on Jan. 20. Details on this year's competition had only been revealed a few weeks before, and the team was knee-deep in creating robot components and experimenting to see what works. The team has a reputation for being a little too ambitious with designs, Mintz said, and has a tendency to create complex, over-engineered parts. But with such a big roster this year and so many students showing up each day, improvements are constantly being made.

"A team full of minds is always better than one," he said.

Hundreds of teams from all over the world participate in the FIRST competition, and Spartan Robotics currently ranks among the best. In 2014, the team took first place at two regional competitions and participated in the final championship game in St. Louis, Missouri, before narrowly losing in the finals. But the recent success and intense student interest in Spartan Robotics has been just that -- recent.

The team's roster has grown exponentially in the past few years, said Austin Schuh, who participated in his first Spartan Robotics game 13 years ago and continues to help out. Back then, he recalled, the team was only eight students strong and had to work out of a science prep area in the middle of a classroom wing. Each day the team would have to clean up and clear out before class the next day.

Now the team has its own home in a small classroom in the back of the campus, full of tools, machine parts, a home-built Computer Numerical Control (CNC) router, and an entire lineage of robots from past years. The CNC router means the team can built some of its parts in-house, and doesn't have to rely solely on metal fabrication shops in the Bay Area during a time-critical phase of the competition.

Schuh's job as the lead software mentor is to help students write the C++ coding that tells the robot what to do during the competition's autonomous round. Many of the students on the team this year -- about 75 percent of whom are freshmen and sophomores -- don't have a strong coding background, but it's an essential part of the competition, he said.

"The robot has no chance of aiming the balls without some sort of software," he said.

Driven by passion

On any given week during "build" season, students and mentors put upwards of 30 hours into designing, building and testing the robot, with the most progress taking place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. But team members don't seem to look at the major time commitment as a sacrifice -- they see it as an opportunity to work on something that matters.

Brian Silverman, who has been on the team for seven straight seasons -- four as a student and three as a mentor -- said it's always fun to work on something that you know will be a finished product, and students get motivated to put in the time and effort when they realize they can actually make a difference in the final design.

Spartan Robotics also gives students a chance to diverge from learning about engineering and computer science in a classroom. Instead, Silverman said, students take part in a hands-on experience where there is no right answer, and the team has to get creative in order to solve real-life problems.

"I want to help show more kids what engineering is really like, where we don't know what the answer is," Silverman said. "You find out if you've got the right answer if it works or not."

Silverman, like Schuh, can't seem to part ways with Spartan Robotics. After graduating from Mountain View High School, he continues to help out as a mentor even after he moved to the East Coast for college, tuning in via Skype and working remotely. Part of the reason why Spartan Robotics transitioned into a highly competitive team and grew in popularity around the 2011-2012 school year, he said, is that mentors like himself kept coming back and building on the team's legacy.

"With more mentors, we've got more bandwidth to work with students who come in and don't know what to do," he said.

For some students, the real action starts at the competitions, which includes a complex combination of on-the-fly adjustments to the robot, scouting other teams and driving the robot during the main event. Sabina Davis, a freshman and team captain, said she picked up a passion for driving back in sixth grade when her brother was on the team, and she got a chance to test drive during a practice game in 2013. She's had a presence on the team ever since, starting out as an off-season driver and pitching in during the build season.

"I was only 4-foot-11when I started," Davis said. "It turns out small hands help with a lot of the electrical work."

Being on the drive team is a little nerve-wracking to think about what's at stake, but it's easy to get in the zone and focus on playing the game, she said. When the competition is over, it's hard to remember how things went.

"You never remember what happened after the match," she said. "That kind of feeling, when you tune everything out and feel like you are the robot, is what makes it all worth it."

The growth in the popularity of the robotics competition has been staggering in the Bay Area over the last five years, said Janet McKinley, the regional director of FIRST for Northern California. It's not uncommon for teams based in Silicon Valley to double or triple in size in just a few years. Nearby teams like Bellarmine's Team 254 -- also known as "The Cheesy Poofs" -- have also thrived and now rank among the best in the world.

Competitions in the area, including the Silicon Valley Regional in San Jose and the newly-added San Francisco Regional, are expected to attract anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 spectators, McKinley said.

Although it's hard to pinpoint what's causing the sudden boost in interest, McKinley said most of the outreach and advertising comes from the bottom up. Students and individual teams are able to drum up excitement about the robotics competition, even for teens who may not have a strong interest in engineering.

Mountain View High School team, in particular, benefits from having a returning cast of mentors that is relentless at building up passion and enthusiasm for the competition, said Steve Silverman, a mentor and father of Brian Silverman. He said a lot of it comes directly from the lead mentors for the team -- Wyn and Michael Schuh -- who manage the team every year, even though their children have long since graduated out of Mountain View High.

"The Schuh family has really set the tone," Silverman said. "It's almost like a cult -- you start out just for fun and you just get sucked in."

Read more here:

Robotics club thrives at Mountain View High - Mountain View Voice

A year-long effort to establish a robotics program as an official 4-H club was rewarded this week.

A year-long effort to establish a robotics program as an official 4-H club was rewarded this week. Shari Graber, a White Pigeon resident who oversees the club, said she was informed Tuesday that the robotics club was approved as a 4-H activity, a status she had been pursuing since last year. A big step for us, a very exciting step, she said. The club started meeting in summer 2016 to prepare a robot for display at the St. Joseph County Grange Fair. The final project was an underwater robot that Graber said debuted very well and drew plenty of attention at the fair. Work centered on wire-cutting and stripping, water-proofing, engineering and other tasks, including determining the flow of electricity. The project, Graber said, involved a substantial amount of teamwork and also required knowledge of electronics, mechanics and programming. Every single member participated, which really pleased me and the success of it really united the group, Graber said. Were now in the process of putting robot guidelines into the fair book so there is a benchmark for judging. Future entries will be categorized in the fairs ribbon class, she said. The club is open to St. Joseph County residents ages 9-19. Beginning in April, members meet 6-8 p.m. the second and fourth Thursday each month at Centreville Elementary School. Graber said the club started with 11 members and now has 25. The growing number, she said, reflects the interest in like-minded students with an interest in the field of robotics. There are kids who are good at sports and thats what they do. There are kids in band and they are good at it, and thats what they pursue, Graber said. There are kids who are more engineering-minded, who are really interested in the technological side of things, and the robotics club is where they seem to shine. Graber earned qualifications to lead the club following a training session at Kettunen Center near Cadillac. Her interest in the program began when she lived elsewhere in Michigan and found herself driving her 8-year-old son an hour each way to a location in Fort Wayne, Ind. Graber found that, after moving to St. Joseph County, her son maintained an interest in the robotics program. Graber, however, decided she had had enough of the hour-long drives. The training took some time and, of course, it was a necessary step, she said. But it was worth it. The kids really enjoy this and I think the parents are happy that the only distance they have to travel is to Centreville once a month. The group currently is working on a robot using eight Lego Mindstorm EV3 core sets. Each kit costs more than $800 and assembly involves knowledge in touch and color sensors, speed, direction and sonar. It also will be programmed to talk and play music, Graber said. What it is is a simplified version of a robot that police, for example, would use to go into a house that might not be safe for a human to enter, Graber said. We have between now and September to perfect it. Graber said a robotics club is common in larger communities or bigger school districts. The larger districts and communities have the luxury of stronger funding, but the St. Joseph County club has a small but strong amount of financial support from residents and local businesses. Knowledge of designing robots is relevant in St. Joseph County, she said. Think about the robotics already in use for agriculture purposes milking, irrigating, soil testing, lots of things out in the fields, Graber said. Beyond that, think about how robotics are used industry right here in St. Joseph County. Im really excited about this club and its potential its exciting to see the kids taking such a strong interest in it. The Centreville-based group is called the CloverBOTS 4-H Club. BOTS is an acronym for Builders Of Technology and Science. The club is supported by Centreville Lions Club, United Way of St. Joseph County, St. Joseph County Youth Council, Meijer, Walmart, Western Diversified Plastics and TH Plastics. In addition to Graber, the club is overseen by Valerie Bungart and Kenton and Michele Kelley.

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News Focus: Club offers youth opportunity in robotics - Sturgis Journal

TACOMA, Wash. -- Hundreds of extremely smart teenagers and their robots will invade the Tacoma Convention Center for the First Tech Challenge Super Regionals this weekend.

The First Tech Challenge is a robotic competition where teams are given the task to design, build, program and operate robots.

"Our robot is doing a challenge that is worldwide," said Robert Winton. "Everyone is competing in the same game."

This season, the teams were issued their challenge in August of 2016.

Their goal was to design a robot that can scoop up whiffle balls and shoot them through a hoop, and also lift a yoga ball into a basket.

"It is an obstacle course mixed with basketball, in that we are shooting things, but also hopefully go for the dunk at the end," said Winton.

Winton, a senior at Seattle Academy, is part of team 2658 Tesseract who began building their robot last September.

"Our robot is a n 18 by 18 by 18-inch robot," said Winton. "We spent weeks brainstorming and doing prototypes out of cardboard and other material just to see if will work and if it is efficient."

Seattle Academy began their robotics club 7 years ago under the guidance of Chemistry teacher Gabe Cronin who has watched his program grow.

"It is hard to explain how proud we are," said Cronin. "When I think about the stuff on the robots, those are kid made decisions and kid constructed work and that is what we are going for."

The hard work paid off last month during the state championship, when Seattle Academy won part of the 1st place in alliance for Washington.

"It is extremely hard, it can be frustrating at times especially when thing so not work," said Winton. "It is a really challenging process, because there are so many things that can go wrong, but it is real cool when it all comes together at the end."

This weekend, Seattle Academy will compete head to head against more than 70 high schools from 13 states at the Super Regionals. The top teams advance to the First Championships in Houston in April.

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Robotics super regionals invade Tacoma this weekend - KOMO News

Luis Sentis will lead a session, A Developers Primer for Coding Human Behavior in Bots, at SXSW on Sunday, March 12, 2017.

Human-centered robotics hold a special place in the robotics field because they both mimic human sensing and cognitive behavior, and are designed to assist humans for safety and productivity. To explore human-centered robotics is to explore human beings and how we sense the world, analyze complex and often conflicting information, and act upon our findings, modifying perception, understanding, and action as new information is available.

Such machines could be of great practical benefit to humans on long space flights to Mars, for instance, or as human proxies in hazardous environments such as a chemical spill or even ordinary circumstances like education or elder care.

Obviously, creating human-centered robots poses many challenges in conception, design, and the hardware and software that support them. My own work in this burgeoning field focuses on designing high-performance series elastic actuators for robotic movements, embedded control systems, motion planning for dynamic locomotion, and real-time optimal control for human-centered robots.

Once we have a platform for human-centered robotics, and once we can create the hardware and software and the logic to drive them, we can turn to its real-world applications, which are many.

Most readers probably have only a passing acquaintance with human-centered robotics, so allow me to use this brief blog to introduce a few ideas about this topic and its challenges.

Humanoid and Human-Centered

Since perhaps the 1950s, television and the movies have often portrayed humanoid robotsrobots that take roughly human formentertaining us with how closely they mimic humans or by how far they fall short. Sometimes, in a dramatic plot turn, a humanoid robot becomes malevolent or uncontrollable by humans.

I prefer the term human-centered robot, because it most closely describes my field of endeavor: How to create a robot that is focused on assisting a human being; sometimes guided by a human, but also learning on its own what action or behavior would be most helpful to that human.

In my view, we do not yet have sufficient evidence to say that humanoid robots are most effective when interacting with humans. They may well be, but we do not have definitive data on the question.

However, it appears anecdotally true that humanoid robots fire the human imagination and that has its benefits. In addition to their portrayal in popular media, I have found that humanoid robots draw the most, well, human interest. Soon after creating one we named Dreamer in 2013, in the Human Centered Robotics Lab (HCRL) at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, we generally received more attention from curious students, engineers, investors andwouldnt you know itmovie producers. (Dreamer eventually had a bit part in Transformers 4 in 2014.) If humanoid robots help draw attention and interest to human-centered robotics, so be it.

Applications and Productivity

The more important aspect of this field is how to create human-centered robotics that sense their surroundings and either respond to human directions or intuit what actions would best serve their human counterpart.

Ive mentioned the possible robotic applications of space travel, perhaps as a companion to astronauts on a space walk, as a human proxy in hazardous environments or as a caregiver to an elderly person. In each case, the notion of productivity is different.

If you think of productivity for robotics generally in a manufacturing setting, it can be measured in terms of hours of work performed and profits earned. But in a long space journey to Mars, productivity will be measured instead in terms of the astronauts enhanced safety and ability to accomplish difficult tasks. In a hazmat spill, productivity might be measured in terms of human lives saved. In elder care, how well did a robot perform in changing bandages or applying ointment to a sore, preserving the persons health?

Robot Knows Best

Another quest in human-centered robotics is to create the ability of a robot to not just predict human behavior, but to perform what I call intervention. Whatever its level of complexity, can we build a robot with logic that assesses a situation for optimal actions, whether directed by a human or not? This translates to a robots ability to say to itself, Well, the human is operating the system in such a way. We could do better if computationally I have a hypothesis about what would be best for the human and intervene with that particular behavior.

This ability requires pairing social cognitive theories with mathematics. And I have found that advances are possible for what I call self-efficacy, which is basically the self-confidence to achieve a certain behavior.

At this point, self-efficacy can be achieved in very simple scenarios. One potential application is to use a human-centered robot to motivate students to solve problems by sensing and reacting to students level of engagement, then producing an interaction that motivates the student and enhances learning. I hope to demonstrate this and give attendees a chance to code such behavior in a human-centered robot at SXSW.

Touch and Whole Body Sensing

One major way in which humans interact is through touch. We place a hand on a shoulder or grasp someones forearm to gain their attention. Robotsparticularly humanoid ones with mobilityare likely to be large and quick, so touch becomes an important element in the safety of their human counterparts. We do not want a robot that runs into an astronaut on a space walk or pins someone to a wall. Thus, we are developing what I call whole body sensing. Though some in this field are pursuing something known as sensory skin, at the HCRL we have taken a more economical approach to minimize the amount of electronics needed.

We use a distributed sensor array on the robots surface, but they number in the dozens, not the thousands employed in sensory skin. Instead, we combine different sensing modalities internal to the robot, such as accelerometers, which aid stabilization, and vibration sensors that enable the machine to triangulate information on whats happening in the immediate environment. This enables the robot to respond to human touch, but within the context of other information it is receiving from its environment. We call this whole-body contact awareness, a combination of internal and external sensing and awareness.

Spin-offs

I hope this mere glimpse into the world of human-centered robotics piques your curiosity. It may serve to attract those who wish to work in the field. But the general public should also understand that advances in this field will eventually make their way into human-centered robotics in our homes, our businesses, manufacturing, agriculture, smart cities, the Internet of Things, you name it. Well have systems somedaywe already do, with limited abilitiesto sense human behaviors and intervene to produce optimal conditions based on an understanding of whats best for the people involved in a particular situation.

Today, we have smart thermostats that learn our preferences for heating and cooling our homes. Tomorrow, we may have human-centered robotic systems that optimize our cities.

Luis Sentis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. He also leads UT Austins Human Centered Robotics Laboratory and is co-founder of Apptronik Systems Inc., a contractor for NASA's Johnson Space Center.

The rest is here:

The Future of Human-Centered Robotics - Electronic Design