Northshore High prepares for robotics competition

St. Tammany News

SLIDELL - When the workday is over, a group of Northshore High School students take over a local business to build a robot.

Neptune Sciences in Slidell has generously donated a workspace to the robotics team, allowing them greater freedom to create their entry for this year's FIRST Competition.

The FIRST Competition is a NASA-sponsored annual event. Teams of high school students from across the country and around the world build robots from identical kits provided to them by NASA. These robots compete in a new game every year in 33 regional competitions and a championship event.

Most teams build their robots on their school's campus, but Salmen High was sharing Northshore's campus when the building began. Space was at a premium, so a location outside of school grounds became a necessity.

"I did some consulting work for Neptune Sciences years ago, so I had been inside the building and I knew what it looked like," Ken Holladay, a team mentor and Lockheed Martin engineer, said. "I knew it was a perfect place for us."

When it came time to ask Neptune Sciences if the Northshore team could use an upstairs workspace, one team member didn't have to go very far. Abby Sykes's family had a special guest living with them as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

Michael Rich, assistant vice president of Neptune Science's parent company, PSI, was staying with the Sykes family when Northshore began to look around for a suitable workspace.

When Sykes asked Rich if Northshore could build a robot at Neptune Sciences, he immediately said yes.

Now the Northshore team can be found every afternoon and weekend busily designing and assembling their robot.

"The weekends are fun because that's when everyone can be here," June Allison, Northshore physics and chemistry teacher, said. "They get a lot of work done on Saturdays."

The team's robot is still in the prototype phase, Allison said.

"Next week will be critical. We'll be trying out a lot of different things to see if they work," she said.

"At first the robot was rear-wheel drive with casters for front wheels, and it really zoomed around," Holladay said. "But then we realized that if in the competition another robot bumped into it, we'd suddenly be 90 degrees off, because those casters won't hold it in place."

The team recently bought new wheels, which required extensive assembly. To increase the robot's traction, 80 pounds of weights have been added and the team installed strips of heavy duty gripping material to the wheels.

Currently the robot is four-wheel drive, one small motor assigned to each wheel, but that configuration might not last.

An oversized pad of paper stands on an easel not far from where the robot is being assembled. Every sheet of paper has another prototype design drawn on it.

Mentors join students at the pad, flipping back and forth through the different ideas, trying to fine tune the robot's design.

The circuit board, which functions as the robot's brain, isn't permanently attached yet, allowing for quick additions and changes.

This flexibility is key at the current stage of the design process, but Holladay worries that the students might be too rough on the robot, which is still in its infancy.

The robot's base is assembled, but the main structure still has to be designed, giving it enough power to zoom around the workspace and no arms or extending booms to break off yet.

"They hot rod it now," Holladay said. "That thing really moves."

The team's greatest disadvantage is that they have never entered the FIRST competition before. "Starting from scratch has been the biggest challenge," Allison said.

"We had to buy a bunch of tools, but we won't have to buy them again next year," Holladay said.

"Our greatest asset is Ricki Takeshita," Allison said.

Takeshita is also an engineer at Lockheed Martin. He's the only person on Northshore's team who has built a robot before, giving him invaluable experience that he readily shares.

During a recent build session, Takeshita spread his knowledge evenly between groups of students working on different aspects of the robot.

He checked on a lighting system that Dustin Lyons and Seth Hardy were setting up, worked on prototype design ideas and helped team member Laura Kraus and fellow mentor Harold Barrios assemble the new wheels for the robot.

Allison plans to work with Northshore's principal Dr. Michael Peterson to develop a robotics class for the next school year. Interest in the FIRST Competition has been so strong this year that developing the class shouldn't be a problem, she said.

"We've got eight or 10 students here every day, and their parents are getting involved, too," Allison said. "We've got three or four parents coming out here every day to help."

Holladay wants to see a robotics class in every St. Tammany school, hopefully spurring enough interest to secure a regional competition in the New Orleans area.

"Right now the closest competitions are in Atlanta and Houston. You have to get something like 30 or 40 schools involved in a 10-mile area to get a regional. I want to see one in this area because people don't think of us as having a large technological community, but we do, and this would get people to see that," Holladay said.

As for the challenge of getting average high school students interested in science and engineering, Holladay said the FIRST Competition is just the thing to do it.

"To paraphrase Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST, how do you get kids involved in science? Make it seem like a fun game," Holladay said.

(Next: Salmen High School)