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Matt Wilce reports on

the day that robots took

over the Ricketson Theater

for Japan’s first VEX

Robotics Competition.

Two robots are gently lowered into two adjacent corners of the competition ring—a square area divided by a central wall—by the students who built them. Facing them on

the other side of the wall are two similar-looking robots. The students step back and on a signal the four robots spring into autonomous action following pre-programmed directions for 20 frenetic seconds. Some career into the central partition successfully knocking miniature rugby balls off their stands into the opposition’s side. Others sweep smaller plastic balls through a gap at the bottom of the wall. Then as suddenly as they started, they freeze. The teams, working in pairs against each other, assess the state of play as they take up their controllers and begin a further two minutes of gladiatorial battling in their attempt to propel as many balls as possible to the other side. Some use rotating plastic strips to sweep up smaller balls into a hopper with the aim of dumping them over the wall. One of the ASIJ robots employs an elegant arm that grabs the fallen rugby balls and deftly drops them over. At the end of the two minutes the judges tally the scores, counting the balls and noting who got the large white bonus ball into their opponents’ court. ASIJ’s first game of Clean Sweep is over and the first VEX Robotics Competition to be held in Japan has really kicked off.

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Fantastic VoyageTeams from California, Hawaii, Texas and Kyoto brought

their bots to ASIJ to compete in an exciting full-day tournament. Observers from Kinnick, Yokota and St. Maur joined the audience to watch as ASIJ hosted and competed for the first time in what was the culmination of chemistry teacher Don Chamber’s year-long work to expand the robotics program at school.

Chamber’s inspiration for developing the program came in part from hearing about the work of alum George Stern ’04. In an email “George described the robotics project he is working on at Johns Hopkins University. He is in the department of biomedical engineering and the team he is working on developed a tiny hand-like ‘gripper’ which, when injected into the circulatory system, can remove clots from arteries or take samples of tissue for biopsy. It is a real life version of that old movie Fantastic Voyage.” Following that Chambers attended a conference where Steven Buchman lectured on the subject of insect photography where he spoke about the difficulty in sneaking up on a frog or a dragonfly, which has wrap around vision. “I sat back for a moment and pondered the scene. Suddenly it struck me, bang, what a great application for robotics! Photographs that robots can take, that would be very difficult, if not impossible to take otherwise. What a great theme for a contest. What a great educational challenge to young people,” says Chambers.

“The world is poised for a second wave of the technological revolution. A big part of that revolution will be in robotics,” he continues. “If the first International Symposium On Robotics in Science and Technology Education held in Yokohama in October, 2009 is any indication, China, Russia, the Middle East, as well as Europe, all of South East Asia, and India have all invested significant resources into developing robotics in education. In fact, the Japanese Monbukagakusho (Department of Education) recently declared that, within three years all Japanese middle schools will include robotics as a required part of the curriculum. We know that what is developed in middle school moves on to high school and from there to all of society at large.”

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1. Helen White and Ayaka Doyle work on the mandible-like grabber on one ASIJ’s robots. 2.Sam Callon, Joe Cho and Jon Tollefson tinker with their robot. 3. Marisa Luck’09 and Skyler Adams join the Robotics Club’s aquabots in the pool for a test dive. 4. Alex Kahl poses with one of new HPI G-Robots dogs that the school was asked to beta-test. ASIJ was one of only 10 high schools and universities to take part in the evaluation of the new robot.

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Batteries Not IncludedWith these ideas in mind, as well as a good deal of enthusiasm from students

in the high school’s robotics club, Chambers worked to build a robotics program at the American School in Japan. The first step was a PTA grant. He observes, “The grant proposal process was really my first lesson in team building in relation to robots. Team building is an integral part of robotics. If the proposal comes from the students themselves, parents, administrators and corporate sponsors are better able to understand that this subject will really interest and engage them. Team building is largely recognizing individual skills. I had noticed that we have a particularly articulate and talented writer in the group, Andrew Irvine ‘10. Andrew and I kicked around ideas to present to the PTA and Andrew did a fantastic job writing it up. The PTA generously supported the idea and we were able to get underway. We bought a lot of different materials, VEX, ROV materials, Robodesigner kits and we attended robot school at RT Corporation in Akihabara. We really jumped into the deep end.”

Help was on hand when Nancy McIntyre, Project Director of Eagle Engineering at Chaminade College Preparatory School and VEX Robotics expert, visited ASIJ in the spring to help launch the program. Her three-day workshop introduced the key concepts of the VEX program and competition and got faculty and students started on building working robots. Within the space of a few days the high school science classrooms and corridor were invaded by prototypes being tested by enthusiastic drivers. Despite all the fun to be had building the robots, McIntyre was also an advocate for the educational impact of a robotics program. “We need to produce more engineers and young people who can work together and solve problems and robotics teams provide students with hands on experience that takes the content that is learned in the classroom and uses it on the playing fields,” she says. Chambers echoed that sentiment in an article about the seminar published in Robot Magazine, saying “We believe that this will be a powerful way to encourage science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) as wells as community involvement at ASIJ.”

Learning how to build robots was only part of the program though as the school also had to learn how to compete in its first competition as well as figure out how to host one. Through connections with other schools in the States with established programs ASIJ joined a vibrant and collaborative community of robotics enthusiasts who shared their experience.

“Although scholastic robotics is played like a sporting event with mechanical devices, one glaring difference is that robotics emphasizes collaboration and sharing. In FIRST Robotics, this is referred to as ‘gracious professionalism.’ In programs like VEX where you play each match with another team, this sharing of ideas and collaboration is critical as your opponent in one match could become your alliance partner in the next,” says Art Kimura of the Hawaii Space Grant Consortium, who joined the visiting Hawaiian teams at ASIJ. “We have been to many robotics tournaments where teams are sharing parts, tools and even their programming, often sending their team members to help others.”

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5. Sam Callon takes his competition robot for a final test drive. 6. Joe Cho works on his robot’s faulty arm. 7. Chas Forelle, Charlotte Lee and Sujoy Bhattacharyya practice before the competition. 8. Alex Ariga poses with his robot. 9. Sam and Joe take their robot for inspection. 10. Nancy McIntyre with ASIJ faculty Mike Moody and Glen Hoskins during her workshop. 11. One of the visiting teams tweaks their machine.

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Game OnThe collaborative element of the VEX Competition soon became

evident on the day as the 13 teams from different schools worked together in alliances against each other. ASIJ’s four teams also found themselves helping each other as they tweaked robots and the computer programs they’d written to control them throughout the day. “In our first game, the robot was not able to exit autonomous mode because our arm got stuck on the wall. The program was designed to bring the arm down until it hit a sensor in the middle of the robot, but since the arm never came down, the program just kept on waiting for the arm to come down, as the arm control motors kept on spinning, wearing down the axle connections and the motors themselves. Not a pretty sight!” Alex Kahl ’10 wrote on his blog.

Once their teething troubles were fixed, ASIJ’s teams put in a strong showing with Alex Ariga ’10 and Sho Sundberg ’10 spending most of the qualifying round near the top of the leader board. Despite being rookies, ASIJ’s other teams also performed well with two teams making it all the way to the finals after they saw off many of the more experienced teams during the quarter and semi-finals. With two teams through to the final it was natural that the ASIJ robots would pair up to make an alliance to take on two rivals from Waialua High School. Charlotte Lee ‘10, Chas Forelle ‘10 and Sujoy Bhattacharyya ’10 joined forces with classmates Alex Kahl ’10 and Jeffrey Nelson ‘10. The final match was a dramatic test of both school’s machines and nerve as the controllers worked hard to score points against each other. After two-minutes of intense activity, ASIJ prevailed to the delight of the home crowd and ASIJ walked off with both teams as tournament champions. Things got even better when the awards were presented and Charlotte, Chas and Sujoy were present with the Excellence Award as well. Their win qualifies both teams to go to the World Championship Competition in Dallas, TX.

The competition focused the interest of many throughout the school with a kindergarten teacher enquiring about presenting a unit on robotics to her class and middle school teachers wanting to start a program there. Going forward, talk has already begun about next year’s competition and as our robotics program continues to grow so too will its impact. “We need to get teachers to think about robotic solutions to real world problems in order to see the vision of robotics as another phase of the technological revolution,” says Chambers. “They need to see that thinking of robotic solutions is thinking out of the box, and that through programs like this our young students have been prepared in many ways to do just that.” •

Photos by Francine Flora, Yoshitaka Sajiand Lem Fugitt | robots-dreams.com

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12. Ritsumeikan and Waiakea work together. 13. One of the robots is put into position on the field. 14-17. Scenes of the competition in progress. 18. Waiakea Robotics take home the Amaze Award. 19. Don Chambers and Art Kimura. 20. ASIJ’s winning teams.

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