Pablo, the autonomous LEGO robot, sat in the corner of a standardized table, waiting for a command from a member of the Boa Constructors to give it marching orders. The Boa Constructors built the autonomous LEGO robot, using one team member’s cousin’s nickname, to compete in the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) LEGO League (FLL) world championships competition.
Members of both the Boa Constructors and M-Cubed represented Monroe County on the world stage in Detroit, Michigan, in late April, bringing their technological expertise and West Virginia values to an international competition. The Boa Constructors received a perfect score for core values and placed first among the 24,000 FLL teams for Gracious Professionalism.
Monroebotics is a 4-H robotics club in Monroe County for middle and high school students, giving them a chance to build and program for one of several competitions. Students from grades 4 to 8 compete in the FLL, created to encourage kids and young people to get involved with science and technology and to teach the students how to blend competition, knowledge, and empathy into mutually supportive competing teams. The FIRST Tech Challenge takes students from grades 7-12, designing and programming a capable robot to compete head to head. The high school level team, M-Cubed, represented Monroebotics in the FIRST Tech Challenge.
Butters, M-Cubed’s robot, was built with a combination of pipes, plastics, metal, and electronics, and at first glance looks like a small cube with wheels on the bottom, the inside full of wires and gears. Able to operate by itself or be driven with Xbox controllers, the box springs to life with multiple arms and grips flipping out and extending. The wheels are lined with rollers, giving Butters the ability to roll and rotate and drive forward in any direction, rather than just straight forward and back like a car.
The competition asks the robots to pick up alternating color cubes, stacking them in different columns, or placing the cubes in a specific color order. Butters was built with two sets of grips for these cubes, letting the robot pick them up two at a time.
Another way the team earns points is to pick up a yellow totem and place it outside of the area the robot competes in. Toward the end of the competition, the team has a limited time period to pick up and place the totems outside of the mat, with each totem moved giving extra points. To assist in this, Butters was given an arm, able to extend over 4 feet, with a 3D printed hand for grabbing the totem.
“Everything is made custom on, cut from aluminum,” explained M-Cubed member Ian Jackson. “[The arm grip] is 3D printed, we’ve got a couple of 3D printed parts on the robot. The wheels, electronics, and servos we bought, but everything else you make.”
The current M-Cubed lineup features Alexander Chernauskas, Jackson, Bryce Sabol, Sarah McClure, Morgan Holzman, Riley Sparks, and Cade McMunigal, teenagers looking forward to working as engineers and building future technology, many of which began their robot making careers on the Boa Constructors team. One member however, McClure, also received lessons in marketing and selling, looking for team sponsorship deals from businesses national and local alike.
“I’m on the business side of the team,” said McClure. “We organize events, go out, and take [the team’s robot] out into the community and show what we do. We hold open houses, dinners, car washes, write letters to tell [potential sponsors] how they can support us.”
The sponsors help send the team to competitions. Just this year, the team traveled to Virginia, Maryland, and Detroit. To get to the world’s competition in Detroit, comprised of the top 5 percent of teams, M-Cubed fought up the ranks in previous competitions. The team didn’t lose a match in the Virginia competition, winning the Inspire Award for not only being a top contender in competition but acting with professionalism both on and off the field. The team then moved on to super regionals, where they ranked third. M-Cubed finished the season at the world’s competition in Detroit, placing approximately in the middle of the international competitors.
“We had a pretty strong season compared to last year,” said Holzman. “This is our second year doing this, and we focused a lot more on the robot this year. Most of the time we’re in the top four or ten.”
The younger Boa Constructors team is made up of Kyleigh Weikle, Michael Fraley, Maegan Crawford, Luke Jackson, Ryan Crawford, Grace McClure, Owen Jackson, Luke Fraley, and Seana Sabol, an enthusiastic group of kids functioning as a well-oiled machine. The FLL competition combines robotics with civic engagement, made up of the robot competition and a core values project. This year’s competition focused on water and how it is found, transported, disposed of, and used.
The Boa Constructors practice with Pablo over and over, an iterative process perfecting each little movement the robot would take on the standardized table each FLL team practiced on, set up with a map and LEGO brick-built structures making up challenges for the competing robots to accomplish.
One of the earliest tasks is to fix a set of LEGO pipes, built to look like they’ve been broken into two pieces. Pablo rolls into position, pushing a broken segment along, jamming the broken pipe back together. In another challenge, the robot travels along a path, picks up a blue-tinted bucket, built to look like water, and drops it on some brown bricks, causing a LEGO flower to pop out.
The 18 challenges are completed one at a time by the LEGO robot, and each time a team member has to touch it to adjust after setting it in motion costs the team points.
The team also designed large poster board projects on water in the community, focusing on how not to dispose of unneeded medication in the sink or toilet, potentially contaminating a water system.
“We discussed ideas on how to make your interaction with water better in your community,” explained Michael Fraley. “We decided that the one most beneficial to us was how to safely dispose of medication.”
The team sent out a survey, spoke to town councils, and researched the issue, leading to their design for a “do it yourself” medication disposal kit. The kit, made up of a Ziploc bag, a quarter cup of water, a cup of coffee grounds or cat litter, can be safety thrown away after crushed medications are mixed inside.
The team took first place in worlds in the subcategory of Gracious Professionalism out of 24,000 teams, and earned a perfect score in core values, demonstrating that not only could the team work well together, they could reach out and help other teams when they needed assistance. How the team won the category was easy to see as they described the competition, excitedly buzzing about the kids they met from Germany, Norway, Korea, Taiwan, Greece, all over the United States, and more. The team’s scrapbook is packet with Polaroid pictures of the teams they met.
The international competition not only showed the students different cultures from their own, but also showed how every culture is made of individuals. Two people from the same country can be very different.
“There were two German teams,” said Luke Jackson. “They were right across from each other. One German team was super serious, all they cared about was robots, they didn’t smile or anything. The other ones were party animals, they were just dancing around, playing German rave music. It was cool.”
The trip wasn’t all work though – both teams got to enjoy hamburgers from Wahlburgers, a riverboat ride, and an escape room while in Detroit.
“It was really stressful during the competition, but that was a good way to cool down and have some fun,” Michael Fraley said.
Both teams are looking forward to next year, mentally designing robots to do whatever problem or task the next competition asks them to solve. To follow along with next year’s events, find the teams on Facebook under Monroebotics.
Read more in the Tuesday, May 15, edition of The West Virginia Daily News.
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