Monthly Archives: June 2017

LEE'S SUMMIT, Mo. - A group of local high school students has an exciting trip planned this summer.

Team Titanium, a FIRST Robotics team with Lee's Summit West High School, was chosen as one of only 15 international teams to travel to China for a robotics competition. The China Urban Youth Robotics Alliance, or CUYRA, invited the team to this year's 4th China Robotics Challenge held in Zhengzhou.

The competition will be held July 26 through 29. CUYRA is contributing $15,000 towards Team Titanium's trip, but they still need to raise $10,000 more.

Team Titanium FRC 1989 took 2nd place in this year's FIRST Robotics World Championship Competition.

"They were just three points shy of being that World Champion," said coach Aaron Bailey. "We started the team back in 2007 and it has been getting better every year."

The competition looks like a life-sized board game with robots as the pawns.

"We have six weeks to build the robots to solve a problem that we are presented with at the beginning of January," said teammate Daniel Schnelle, a recent graduate looking to study mechanical engineering. "At the end of the six weeks we have to put the robot into a sealed bag and we cannot touch or work on our robot until we get to our competition."

Robots for this year's competition had to collect gears and move them to a central location, shoot balls into a tube and climb a rope before the round ended. Each of these tasks gains the team points.

"There's 3,000 teams," said Schnelle. "I don't know of any time where there's been two identical robots. We build with sheet metal, so ours is never like anybody else's."

"We love watching these kids work hand to hand with professionals to build, to fold metal, to wire robots, to learn these deep technical skills, but also know what it means to work really, really hard," said Bailey. "We want our kids to know there are great job opportunities right here, you don't have to leave our community. We want to make Lee's Summit a great place to live."

According to its mission statement, FIRST Robotics works to "inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting Mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation."

Many students who participate end up following the career path to technology and/or science jobs.

"A lot of our team is planning on going into multiple varieties of engineering. We have electrical, mechanical, civil, engineering management," said Schnelle.

To learn more about FIRST click here:https://www.firstinspires.org/

If you would like to help Team Titanium on their voyage to China there are two ways to do so:

GoFundMe:www.gofundme.com/titaniumtochina

Mail: Payable to "LSWHSRobotics", and sent toLSWHSRobotics, c/o NancySpatz,2600 SW Ward Rd., Lee's Summit, MO 64081

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Lee's Summit robotics team heads to China - KSHB

It feels like robotics kits are everywhere these days, as companies compete to figure out the best way to turn basic robotics, electronics, and coding concepts into a toy or game to get kids to learn STEM skills under the guise of having fun.

Boson, from DRFRobot, is the latest of these, and it has all the trappings of a STEM learning toy: colorful plastic, simple design, and powerful possibilities for those willing to learn the system. At its core, Boson is a block coding tool similar to Tynker or Blockly, but built in the real world with various physically connected blocks instead of virtual representations.

The Boson modules are divided into four kinds, easily identifiable by color: blue ones are for inputs, green for outputs, yellow for functions, and pink for power. Theres no coding or soldering necessary to use Boson just connect the blocks together, and youre good to go.

Boson also offers an impressive variety of over 50 modules across the four categories. There are sensors for heat, humidity, flame, conductivity, soil, IR, light, motion, touch, sound, steam, and more along with a variety of buttons and joysticks for inputs. Outputs offer things like motors, servos, fans, buzzers, LEDs, and an OLED monitor. Function modules allow for building out basic logic functions, like AND, OR, and NOT. And if the module blocks arent enough, Boson is also compatible with Arduino, making it possible to write more advanced programs with languages like Python and JavaScript.

The other selling point of Boson is the compatibility of the modules with other things. You can connect Boson modules to Lego bricks, screw them onto things, place them on a fridge with magnets, or velcro them to a wall.

DFRobot is selling four different kits of Boson modules, each focused on different projects a basic Starter kit for $45, a Science kit for $109, a Coding kit for $109, and an Inventor kit for $139. There are also bundles of the Science and Inventor sets for $219, and the Science, Coding, and Inventor sets for $309. DFRobot has been around for a while selling various microcontrollers and electronic components, and has successfully ran a previous Kickstarter, so backing Boson is probably safer than most crowdfunded campaigns. That said, as always, you should use your best judgement when backing.

DFRobot hopes to ship the Boson kits in September and October.

See the rest here:

The Boson kit is a modular robotics set that will teach kids STEM topics and coding - The Verge

Utah's new lab to use robotics to speed up rape kit testing (File photo: KUTV)

TAYLORSVILLE, Utah (AP) Officials are hopeful Utah's major rape kit backlog will be reduced now that a new state crime laboratory has opened where robotic machines can extract DNA samples and deliver them to forensic technicians much faster than humans.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports (http://bit.ly/2s1wiRt ) a new Unified State Laboratory was opened Thursday in Taylorsville, where Lab Director Jay Henry says the robotics station does the repetitive work of extracting DNA, then delivers the data to forensic scientists. In addition to freeing up a technician to do more analytical work, the station is capable of extracting DNA faster.

The station is capable of processing 96 samples in less than eight hours, a task that took Henry three or four days when he worked as a lab technician.

Follow this link:

Utah's new lab to use robotics to speed up rape kit testing - KUTV 2News

The Stormgears FIRST robotics team had a solid performance in the World Championships, ranking 31 out of 68 teams in their division, during competition April 26-29 in St. Louis.

The team, whose members include students from Westford Academy, Blanchard Middle School, Acton-Boxborough High School, Chelmsford High School, RJ Grey High, Lawrence Academy and Minuteman Tech, won half of the games they participated in.

Earlier in April, the team won the New England Engineering Inspiration Award at the New England District Championship at the University of New Hampshire, qualifying them for the championship. At the championship, there were a total of six divisions with about 400 teams competing.

The team has competed in the World Championships every years since they started as a rookie team three years ago, and, although the Stormgears didnt advance to the final rounds, the team is already preparing for next year and actively recruiting new team members.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to show students of every age that science, technology and problem-solving are not only fun and rewarding, but are proven paths to successful careers and a bright future. In this years competition, FIRST Steamworks students built a robot that could collect balls and shoot them into a boiler steam, pick up and deliver gears to turn a rotor, and prepare for flight by latching onto a rope and climbing. Two opposing alliances of three teams competed in a 27-by-56-foot area in a series of three-minute matches that combined both autonomous and computer controlled robot action.

The team meets at SMC, LTD in Devens.

Link:

Stormgears team competes in international robotics competition - Westford Eagle

For the third consecutive year, a student team at the University of Alabama placed first at a NASA robotics contest.

Alabama Astrobotics took the top prize at the NASA Robotic Mining Competition, besting student teams from 45 other institutions in the challenge to build a robot capable of navigating and excavating simulated Martian soil, or regolith.

Winning the NASA Robotic Mining Competition for a third straight year is amazing and humbling, said team lead Joseph Kabalin, a recent mechanical engineering graduate from Loveland, Ohio. Our team knows how hard it is to get here and how much work it takes. It was truly a team effort.

The team has more than 60 students from across eight disciplines, including engineering and computer science, and it is the only team to win more than once in the contests eight years, placing first four times in 2012, 2015, 2016 and this year.

I am very proud of the team members, said Dr. Kenneth Ricks, team adviser and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. They bought into our process, put their individual needs aside for the good of the team, and dedicated themselves to excellence in every category, which was recognized by the competition judges.

Robots are judged on how much regolith they can dig and deposit into bins as well as their ability to operate on their own, or autonomously. This year, Alabama Astrobotics collected a record amount of regolith, and the robot was the first ever to complete its tasks fully autonomously.

The team placed first in five of nine categories that included mining, autonomy, technical presentation, effective use of communication with the robot and outreach project. Alabama Astrobotics placed in the top three of every category, racking up the most points in the contests history. In all, the students won $10,000 for use on next years robot.

The team designed and built a new robot, but stuck with the approach that netted the top prize the past two years. The students improved some of the robots mining capabilities, making it lighter and upgrading its ability to operate autonomously, Kabalin said.

The robot is called MARTE 2017, which stands for the Modular Autonomous Robotic Terrestrial Excavator 2017, and kept the bucket ladder excavator and an offloading conveyor belt. It also continued to use lidar sensors to scan in 3-D using 16 lasers to measure distance and determine an objects position. The sensors are a sort of radar that uses light instead of sound.

This year the team installed an electronic device called an inertial measurement unit to help make the autonomy more reliable.

The technology concepts developed by the collegiate teams for this competition could be used to mine resources on other planets, according to NASA.

The team received funding from the Alabama Space Grant Consortium, NASA, Dynetics, Fitz-Thors Engineering, Crank N Chrome, Ion Motion Control, Trailer Store Plus, SolidWorks and the University of Alabama.

Republished with permission of Alabama NewsCenter.

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University of Alabama robotics team claims third straight victory at NASA competition - Alabama Today