Daily Pioneer News

PLATTEVILLE - The pressure is on and the clock is ticking as members of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville's F.I.R.S.T. Robotics team are in the midst of the six weeks they're allotted to build a robot to use in competitions this spring.

UWP students are involved in the project, but the ultimate responsibility for building the robot and operating it during competition falls to area high school students. The UWP students serve as mentors.

This is the 15th year of competition for UWP's team, making it the oldest in Wisconsin. Clyde Holverson, mechanical technology specialist for the UWP College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Science, has been advisor since the group started.

Details of the design and competition for this year's robot were announced simultaneously through a NASA TV webcast on Saturday, Jan. 3, at approximately 100 locations around the globe. A group of 14 from the UWP team - including high school and college students and two faculty members - traveled to Waukesha County Technical College in Pewaukee to hear the details and pick up a kit with parts that must be used to build the robot.

From the day of that webcast, teams have six weeks to build a robot. Every year, the rules change to ensure that a few curve balls have to be fielded by the competitors. While some may try, the annual changes help prevent teams from getting a head start on their designs.

For instance, several of the UWP mentors said that a big challenge this year will be building a robot that will run on a surface called Regolith, which they described as industrial wall tile. Most past competitions have taken place on carpet.

"Every year the game changes, and it really is a game," said Matt Winkler, an education major from Platteville. "We're doing the math to figure out how to stick to the floor and not overpower the robot."

The Platteville team includes students from Dodgeville, Platteville and Southwestern high schools as well as a home-schooled student. The UWP students said they are working hard to get more high school students involved and say they hope a student from Cuba City High School will join the group soon.

During the six-week build period, the group meets after school in Ottensman Hall on the UWP campus four nights a week. They also meet every Saturday. Attendance at every meeting isn't required, but the UWP students said most of the high school students can't get enough.

"We're putting a lot of effort this year into expanding the program," Winkler said. "Our goal is to get involved with teachers in the area and to start doing regular demonstrations in the high schools."

Winkler said they always bring a couple of robots to the high school demonstrations - typically followed with mini-workshops at the school for students who express interest - and also gain visibility by taking their robots to area parades and high school football games.

This year's robot is designed to pick up light nine-inch balls and launch them into trailers attached to their opponents' robots for points during a two-minute, 15-second match. Additional points are awarded for scoring a special game ball in the opponents' trailers during the final 20 seconds of the match.

The contest rules say that all robots must drive themselves for the first 15 seconds of the competition. "Then, you can control it however you want with joysticks or potentiometers," said Tim Wilson, the club treasurer, a computer technologies major from Appleton.

All F.I.R.S.T. Robotics teams around the world must ship their completed robots to storage warehouses by the Tuesday, Feb. 17, deadline. The UWP team will compete in two regional competitions in Milwaukee on March 12-14 and Minneapolis on April 2-4.

This is the first time the UWP team has traveled to two regional competitions in the same year. They hope they can learn from their first competition and tweak their strategy for Minneapolis, said Justin Cooper, the club president and a computer technologies major from Mukwonago.

The competitions are friendly and the UWP students say they always make an effort to help teams competing for the first time.

The UWP team won its regional competition last year, earning it the right to advance to the national competition.

"The reason we won the Milwaukee region is because we had a reliable robot that never broke down," Cooper said.

The UWP students agreed that they would like to take on more risk this year.

"I'd rather set a bar high and miss it than set a bar so low and get over it with ease," Winkler said. "You're going to learn a lot more from failure than winning every attempt."

All three team leaders have been involved with F.I.R.S.T. Robotics for years. This is Cooper's eighth year. He was involved for four years at Mukwonago High School and four years at UWP. Winkler has been involved for 12 years, moving up through various Platteville School District programs and then to UWP. Wilson also was involved at Appleton East High School before coming to UWP.

"We all grew up with this in high school and we all liked it so much," Wilson said.

Winkler, who is majoring in education rather than engineering, and said he can see how F.I.R.S.T. Robotics eventually will work into his teaching career.

"I realize what an opportunity this can be," he said. "Students can get involved in this and work toward understanding if they want to be engineers. It gets high school students involved with math and science - and it's as fun and exciting as any sport."

Overall, more than 195,000 students are part of 17,591 teams from across the United States and also Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Turkey and the United Kingdom. F.I.R.S.T. - For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology - was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, best known for inventing the Segway. In addition to the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics competition, younger students compete with Lego and less-complicated robots.

For more information on UWP's F.I.R.S.T. Robotics team, contact Winkler at winklema@uwplatt.edu.

Contact: Matt Winkler, public relations coordinator, UWP F.I.R.S.T. Robotics, winklema@uwplatt.edu Written by: Gary Achterberg, UWP Public Relations, (608) 342-1194, achterbergg@uwplatt.edu