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The Red Devils Robotix Team has been climbing uphill preparing for the U.S. FIRST Robotics Boston Regional Competition next week.
This year’s bout will be Burlington High School’s initial FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition. The Red Devils are staffed mostly with rookie underclassmen, rather than experienced juniors and seniors. After losing the room it had been headquartered in, the team operated out of a school hallway for a time. The recession also took its toll on the team — the school’s tech education teacher was laid off during the year, but stayed on as a coach to the robotics team.
As the team made final adjustments to its robot a few days before shipping it to Boston University’s Agganis Arena for the competition, team president Neil Patel wasn’t high on the rookie team’s chances of winning, but said he was enjoying the work — four or five hours a day, six days a week outside of schoolwork.
“Maybe next year we’ll actually go for winning it,” he said.
The Red Devils are just one of 52 New England high school teams — including the Nutrons, with students from Boston Latin School, Catholic Memorial School and Brookline High School mentored by Northeastern University engineering students — competing in the Boston regional, and one of hundreds of U.S. and international schools competing in the 18th annual robotics competition. The winners of the local challenges and 43 other regionals around the United States, including one in Manchester, N.H., where FIRST is based, face off in the national championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta in April.
This year’s contest, called “Lunacy,” features a low-friction court surface and slippery wheels for the robots. Every robot will have a basket trailing behind it. The object of the game is to collect balls and deposit them into the opposing team’s basket.
Back in Burlington, the Red Devils Robotix Team has designed its approximately 5-foot-by-3-foot robot, tentatively named Blitzkreig, to collect a ball by rolling over it with a conveyor belt studded with styrofoam slats. The belt carries the ball vertically up the robot’s body and drops it into a short ramp, where a spinner positioned above the ball shoots it, ideally into enemy baskets.
Volunteers from Lockheed Martin Corp., Parametric Technology Corp. and iRobot Corp. have been coaching the Red Devils since the competition started about six weeks ago. Mike Grumbach, who works on radar and systems integration for Lockheed Martin, said the team has performed “much, much better” than he expected, given its inexperience.
Grumbach said the competition was like running a small company for the students, who have to perform engineering feats, manage a labor force and do public relations. Unlike team sports, whose coaches tell athletes exactly what to do, the students make all the decisions themselves, Grumbach said.
“We’re just trying to keep them in bounds, give them reality checks, keep them safe,” he said.
PTC project manager Raghu Kumar said he is playing several roles — his son, Priteesh Shahi, a student at North Andover High School, which has no team, is on the Burlington team.
“I’m his driver also,” he said.
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