Livingston Robotics Team Wins Awards

On Feb. 12, the 2011-2012 New Jersey FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) State Championship tournaments was held at New Jersey Institute of Technology.  

Forty-eight (48) robotics teams from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York competed for the two invitations to go to the FTC World Championship.  

Team Landroids from the Livingston Robotics Club won the prestigious inspire award for best represented as a role model team, a top contender in all judged categories, and was a strong competitor on the field. This award qualified the Landroids to go to St. Louis to compete at the world level in April.

Landroids also won the final alliance award and was nominated for think awards for their engineering notebook at the New Jersey State Championship.

This year’s FTC “Bowled Over” competition challenge requires pushing bowling balls, knock over crates, put racquetballs in the crates, harvesting and dispensing magnet balls, climbing ramps, plus stacking and lifting crates as high as possible.

Raising crates turned out to be the game changer.  Instead of scoring the 2-points racquetballs, the 25-point magnet ball or bowling ball, teams raced to design the highest lifter possible out of the allowable 18” cube robot size.  The highest and multiple crate lifters can easily earn hundreds of points in one shot. Currently, a few teams are experimenting with lifters up to 15 feet, pushing imagination and engineering to the limit.

The six 10th-grade members of team Landroids had a different approach. Instead of building the tallest lifter and focused solely on high scoring, they regard the robot as their research platform early in the season.

Each member took on a wish list item and spent the past five months learning and developing the engineering skills needed to create a versatile robot.

The result combined the mechanical, electronics and programming collaboration to develop a vision system, a magnetic sensor array, and a novel hybrid holonomic drive train. Onboard the robot, is a compact but strong 8 foot tall scissor arm capable of lifting multiple crates.  The scissor arm design was stress tested and optimized in Pro-E CAD using finite element analysis to provide maximum structural integrity with 23 percent of weight reduction.  

In Landroids’ second season competing in the FTC high school level, the journey has been more than just the 30-hours per week of workload that they are accustomed to, the Landroids also has to learn to make some very hard life decisions.

Last month, at the Delaware State Championship, due to a complex advancement system, as the #2 Inspire Award winner and the Final Alliance team, Landroids would have been able to go to the World Championship if they “throw the game” in the final elimination round.

Instead, the Landroids held on to play seen consecutive rounds, proving that their robot could defeat the two highest scoring team in the country, but to help advancing another team, who was the alliance captain to St. Louis instead of themselves.  It was a difficult on-field decision but the Landroids competed with integrity and was well respected by their peers.

Besides building robots, the entire team of six members also taught a five-week robotics class at NJIT and interned with the NJIT Biomedical Engineering Department last summer.  The team is also highly involved with mentoring and volunteering in all four FIRST Divisions, hosting and organizing various events and exhibitions, as well as collaborating with medical, academic and engineering professions on different projects.

The Landroids held their fifth annual Liberty Science Center Engineers Week FIRST Exhibition on President’s Day.  A dozen award winning Jr. FLL, FLL, FTC and FRC teams were invited for a joint robotics exhibition from 9 AM to 3 PM on that day, showing everything from LEGO bricks and gears to large size metallic machines.  In addition, the Landroids also invited the popular MakerBot to demonstrate their latest 3-D printing robots.  

As a dedicated and hardworking neighborhood robotics team, the Landroids has been putting Livingston, NJ on the world map for the past 5 years by winning many high profile national and international competitions.  As the team preparing for the 2012 World Championship, support and donations are highly welcome.  

Tax-deductible donations can be made to “Livingston Robotics Club” (a non-profit 501c(3) organization), and mail the check to Livingston Robotics Club, Inc., 4 Sparrow Drive, Livingston, NJ 07039.

— By  Pearl Hwang, Coach of Team Landroids and President of Livingston Robotics Club