It’s not Skynet (yet), but as the Minnesota State High School League’s robotics tournament approaches this weekend, the machines are most certainly on the rise.
A decade ago, there were two robotics teams in the state. This year there are 193 — and, as supporters like to boast, that outstrips the number of boys varsity hockey teams. The best will compete (and just as frequently, cooperate) Saturday to see who built the handiest bot.
“I have no idea what they’re doing, and I have no idea how they know what they’re doing, but they do, and they’re brilliant,” said Amy Doherty, the tournament manager for the high school league.
Saturday’s event at the University of Minnesota’s Williams Arena is the high school league’s fourth annual year-end robotics competition. The season starts in January with the announcement of the year’s engineering challenge that teams worldwide try to solve.
The challenge might be making a robot that can throw discs into a target or pass an exercise ball. This year, it’s stacking towers of plastic recycling bins.
Teams spend six frenzied weeks building the machines. Then it’s on to regional and national competitions to put their designs to the test. The top 30 performers qualify for the high school league tournament.
It’s a diverse bunch of contenders. The smallest team in the tournament has seven members, the largest more than 50.
Some schools are all in: At Greenbush Middle River near the Canadian border, 39 of about 140 students are involved with the team.
POPULARITY GROWS
“I think we really hit a sweet spot,” said Mark Lawrence, regional planning chairman for the Minnesota branch of FIRST, the national organizing body for robotics competitions. “We had a bunch of kids that love to be competitive but weren’t really inclined to go out for an athletic team, and this just spoke to them.”
Lawrence first got involved in 2005, helping a pair of Edina students start a team with a grant from NASA. Since then, he’s seen Minnesota become the state with the most robotics teams per capita, riding an explosion in popularity that coincided with a renewed emphasis on science and technology in education.
It’s a world with rock stars far removed from traditional bastions of high school glory: Math and Science Academy in Woodbury, home of the Fighting Calculators, doesn’t have a football team, but “in the robotics world, they’re huge,” Doherty said.
Teams begin with a standard kit that includes the basics — motors, a gearbox, a frame, wheels — and a number of odds and ends. A rookie group might use those materials exclusively; others supplement with custom parts. There’s a $4,000 spending limit to keep the playing field level.
Many teams find sponsors to cover the expenses, both in local businesses and in national science and tech companies like Boston Scientific and St. Jude Medical that see the participants as potential future employees.
Once the building period is over, the robots can be modified only in a few frenzied hours before competitions. They don’t look much like what you’d see in the movies — think less C3P0 and more remote-controlled forklift — but they get big, with some standing nearly 6 feet tall and weighing more than 100 pounds.
The students do the heavy lifting (or rather, build the machines that do), but they’re guided by mentors with real-world expertise, the robotics equivalent of a coaching staff.
MENTORS HELP
Doug Jensen, an electrical engineer for 3M, is the lead mentor for the Woodbury East Ridge ERRORS (full name: East Ridge Robotic Ominous Raptors). The team went deep in the world championships in St. Louis in April before falling to the eventual winners. It’s currently ranked 17th out of about 3,000 in the world.
Jensen’s job is to help guide the process and steer the team’s 40 students toward viable concepts.
“A lot of times kids will say, ‘Let’s make a jet-powered quadricopter with a rocket in it,’ ” he said. The mentors help rein them in toward something within the realm of possibility.
Still, “It’s not a matter of adults building the robots,” he said. “This is all our kids.”
The competition this weekend consists of a series of preliminary rounds, each lasting just a few minutes, in which the teams will use their robots to complete tasks such as stacking bins and clearing refuse.
It’s cooperative as well as competitive — teams are paired with two others to work together.
In later rounds, the top teams get to choose their allies. In the end, three teams will be crowned champion together. Irondale, Chanhassen and the Math and Science Academy are the defending champs, and the first two are back in the field again.
It’s “a microcosm of what real engineering is about,” Jensen said — solving a problem with restrictive constraints on time and resources.
“I really wish they had had something like this when I was a kid,” he said. “All I got to do was play in my basement with my dad. I didn’t get to build robots.”
Marino Eccher can be reached at 651-228-5421. Follow him at twitter.com/marinoeccher.
IF YOU GO
What: Minnesota State Robotics Tournament
When: 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota, 1925 University Ave. S.E., Minneapolis
Admission: Free and open to the public
Note: Closed-toed shoes required to tour workshop area
