Robotic Adventures at the FIRST Competition

Mascots line up for the parade:  Paul Gleason

Day Two

Saturday morning, March 7, begins with the official mascot parade. Darth and the red dragon are back, along with an X-wing pilot, a storm trooper, a boy in a half-snail half-tank suit, and dozens of other students carrying banners or wearing their school flags like capes. In addition to their Union Jack flag, the British team wears novelty Union Jack hard hats. The Union Jack waistcoats, one promises, will come later. (It turns out he's not kidding.) As the mascots precess around the field, their teammates and parents cheer and whoop from the bleachers.

The lights dim, and the huge screen over the field plays a message from FIRST's founder Dean Kamen and board chairman Woodie Flowers, an emeritus professor of engineering at MIT with a white moustache and ponytail. In 1960, they say, JFK challenged America to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In 1969, when Apollo 11 completed its mission, the average age of a NASA engineer was twenty-six. That means, they pointedly infer, the young engineers heard JFK's speech when they were eighteen. Kamen and Flowers then fast-forward to the present, and jab at the banking and real-estate industries for making money off of money instead of scientific innovation. They tell the students to keep working hard; no one's going to bail out their educations.

After that, six teams make their final inspections while a bouncy MC with flowers in her hair, pink and blue, trots onto the field. Each team gets an introduction (names, hometowns, and sponsors), and the qualifying rounds begin.

Teams will play seven matches with random allies in each. These qualifiers will last all day and continue tomorrow morning. At the end of the qualifiers, the top eight teams get to pick their allies and a knock-out tournament determines the regional champion.

Shortly before ten o'clock, the RoboWarriors have a rematch with Team Overdrive. As Moser promised, Overdrive's design is simple. It looks like a big Z, with an open-fronted base, a wide diagonal conveyor belt, and a clear hopper on top. The conveyor belt scoops up moon rocks, and a lift in the hopper tips them back out. It is anything but stupid, however. Its single-minded focus on gathering and dumping as many moon rocks as possible looks smart as it unloads on the RoboWarriors' trailer. One of the other robots in Overdrive's alliance doesn't work, though, making it an easy target. At the end of the two-minute match the RoboWarriors' alliance wins by eight points (a mere four moon rocks).

The RoboWarriors' Ben Wasser points out that this is Overdrive's first loss of the year -- at last week's New Jersey regional they went undefeated, upsetting his team in the process. Wasser feels responsible for that. He had insisted on equipping their robot with a cannon instead of a hopper, thinking that precision would trump volume. Overdrive's win proved him wrong, and he recalls standing next to their robot at the awards ceremony, looking at it and thinking this is so simple. While the ceremony continued around them, he and a teammate drew up a new design. They built their hopper in a day with measurements from a 3-D computer model rather than the actual robot, which had already been boxed and shipped to the Javits Center. So far it's working well.

Other teams make repairs or adjustments between matches, and the action in the pit is as furious as the action on the field. The robots frequently malfunction, and teams don't have long to figure out what went wrong before they're due for another round. Shortly before the lunch break, Overdrive's conveyor belt stops turning in the middle of a match. They spend the final minute knocking the other alliance's robots around the rink, content to wreak havoc on anyone who tries to score on them. Afterwards they rush their robot back to the pit, where the mentors scatter as the students go to work. They quickly spot the problem: the lift that drops the moon rocks out of their hopper was working mechanically but not electronically. The conveyer belt doesn't run when the lift is engaged, and the lift, despite being down, sent signals claiming it was up. The team finishes its repairs in plenty of time for their 2 p.m. match, and wins it easily.

Hauppauge High School is also having trouble. They beat a rival Long Island school in their first match, but haven't done very well since. Adult mentors tinker with the robot while Nolan Conway stands to the side, watching. A few of the other students are playing video games. This year's team settled on a more defensive design, he says, one that tries to take the other alliance's best robot out of the game by pinning it against a wall.