Members of the Bloomfield High School Robotics Team and advisers. The team is hoping to make it to the sport’s world championships in Houston later this year.
The Bloomfield High School Robotics Team is building, programming and testing a ball-tossing robot for two competitions this month that, in a way, combine mechanical hockey and basketball.
The goal, according to Phun Chen, a team advisor with Michael Warholak, who founded the team, is to build a robot, or bot, capable of playing a game with or without someone at the controls.
“It’s a shooting game and pretty popular,” Chen said last week in Warholak’s classroom where the robot was undergoing tests. “The competitions are a remix of games from previous years, so you just can’t reuse your previous bot designs.”
The object is for the robot to shoot melon-sized balls into a receptacle a certain distance above the floor. That’s the basketball part.
Starting the clock, with a considerable number of balls regimented in the middle of the gym, a robot races from its end of the court and collects one to shoot. Consequently, it scatters balls across the floor. Or, playing it safe, a robot can remain at its own end and shoot balls especially placed there. The action depends on how the robot is programmed.
“There are different elements of strategy,” Chen said. “You can have your bot be a shooter or defender. A defender just gets in the way. Essentially, one bot will get in front of another bot or steal the other team’s balls.”
That’s the hockey part of it.
Enter the human element. One school does not compete against another school. Instead it is several schools, randomly picked, playing together as a team. And as the competition progresses through the afternoon, schools recombine. Consequently, every school plays with and against each other.
“There are six bots on the floor,” Chen said. “Three to each side; three separate schools. Bloomfield is building a shooter robot.”
Games are divided into timed periods. During what is called an autonomous period, the robots move without remote commands. Instead they are controlled
by computer programs which are fed situational data through visual sensors.
And then there is a period when a student pilots the robot. A game is about 30 minutes.
In a competition, there is a lot of down time. Things get broken and sometimes a robot has to be reprogrammed. About 10 team members are going to these upcoming competitions as the robot’s crew and each student has a specific job such as pilot, lead programmer, builder/engineer and the scout who is tasked with finding out the capabilities of other robots. This is done openly with scouts speaking among themselves. The BHS scout is senior Jake Lo who also runs the robotics clubs at Watsessing and Oak View elementary schools.
He said the game is played worldwide. When Bloomfield registered to play, it was given a number: 5732. That meant it was the 5732nd school to sign up. The number is displayed prominently on a wall.
The competitions will be played at two New Jersey high schools, Seneca and Mount Olive, March 14-15 and 28-29, respectively. These are the district competitions in the mid-Atlantic region. The regional championships will be held at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. In 2021, BHS made it to the regionals. The world championships are held in Houston.
Chen said the spirit of the game is very competitive, but its goal is to foster community. He offered an example.
“We brought a bot to a competition,” he said. “It had a rotary drive mechanism so it could spin while it drives. But when we got to the competition, it stopped. The bot came to a standstill. We couldn’t figure out what went wrong. Several teams came over and lent their programmers to find the problem in the computer code. They couldn’t find it. Finally an adviser came over and solved the problem. We lost a bunch of time, but eventually we got to compete because we could field a full team.”
Chen said this was to everyone’s benefit because your opponent in one match may be your teammate in the next and then their problems will be yours.
At these robotic competitions, an award is given to the most helpful team. That prize alone will get a school into the next round. And there is an award that goes to the robotics team that has benefited their community the most. Win that and automatically you go to Houston.
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