Students gear up for Robot Riot

Summit Charter Collegiate Academy eighth-grade students Genevieve Roman and Lorissa Holguin cheered following the second round of a practice-run robotic competition. The team of two completed the task — using a robotic arm to fill a small basin with nuts and bolts — in a record 39 seconds Wednesday afternoon in Hoss McNutt’s classroom at SCCA.

It was all done in fun and in anticipation of Robot Riot — a day of robotics fun and competition with several events and exhibitions.

During the first round, Roman and Holguin placed second with a time of 54 seconds.
“We built it ourselves at the beginning of the year,” Holguin said.

The wooden arm moves with hydraulics — oral syringes filled with water, Roman explained.
Teamwork was required as Roman worked the hydraulics, moving the arm to the proper place while Holguin controlled a battery-operated magnetic claw in the picking up and releasing of nuts and bolts into an elevated basket on a seesaw beam. When the basket was heavier than the opposite side with weights, the weighted side lifted, the basket side dropped, the stopwatch was stopped and time recorded.

For Carlos Ruiz and Indiana Sullins, the time was recorded as 1 minute 6 seconds.

“Trying to raise that arm up and working [simultaneously] is challenging,” Ruiz said.
Earlier in the day, Frankie Martinez and Justin Roach worked on their robotic arm, trying to remove air from a hydraulic vial to help speed the process.

“It looks like we got some air in there and that’s making it go slow,” Martinez said.
While some students worked on the robotic arms, Dylan Hunter concentrated on building a strong structure using weak wood.

“I’m using balsa wood. It’s really weak,” he said as he snapped what looked like a twig. “However when I combine them and make three posts, I’ll attach them to a pressure plate and it will be strong enough to hold 300 pounds.”

Sponsored by the Tulare County Office of Education, the nine-event competition is open to all students, from elementary to high school age, and there is no fee to participate.
Awards and prizes will be offered, said Hoss McNutt, robotics instructor at SCCA, and schools from all over the county are expected to participate.

The events planned — Tug-O-War, The Big Climb, Slow Drag, Follow that Line, Super Sweep, Tractor Pull, Cable Car, Lead me Home Pythagoras, and Alliance Tug-O-War — vary in skill and challenge and offer the participants an opportunity to showcase their skills in planning, engineering and programing robots.

Each event has it’s own challenges, with The Big Climb, the competition measures how fast the robot can climb a hill. In Slow Drag, the last robot in wins, and in Lead me Home Pythagoras, the robot must be programed to travel around a triangular course and stop as close to the starting point as possible.

“It’s a great time to see what everyone is doing,” McNutt said about the scheduled event. “We’ll have students from different schools and they will all bring their projects. We’ll have a robotic pig and we’ll fire up a drag racer. Redwood High School of Visalia will bring their Vex-robotic team. It’s going to be interesting.”

Robot Riot is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at Summit Charter Collegiate Academy, 15550 Redwood Drive. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, call Glenn Williams, TCOE, at 651-3047; or Hoss McNutt at 788-6440, Ext. 8601.

Contact Esther Avila at 784-5000, Ext. 1045, or eavila@portervillerecorder.com. Follow her on Twitter @Avila_recorder.