Issue date: April 08, 1998
By IAN HADDOCK
Two Menlo-Atherton High School teams, sponsored by SRI International, recently competed against six other schools in a robotic contest, known as "KIPR BotBall," at NASA Ames.
In this event, each team creates an autonomous robot that can gather ping-pong balls and deposit them in a bucket. The winner is the one that deposits the most balls of a certain color in 90 seconds.
Preparation for the competition had begun weeks earlier, when each team received a kit of Lego pieces, motors, sensors, and a programmable controller board.
A larger than expected turn-out of M-A students resulted in two teams entering the competition. Each team worked out unique designs, but continued to share ideas.
As the competition got under way, things looked favorable for the M-A teams. "Prime," the robot built mostly by seniors, earned the most points of any robot in the seeding rounds. "Optimus," built mostly by juniors, also scored quite high.
During the real competition, the M-A teams were thwarted by robots whose strategy was to simply block the goal bucket, rather than attempt the complicated task of collecting and depositing ping-pong balls throughout the round. Optimus was eliminated early by robots using this strategy; Prime advanced to the semi-final, but was put out of the competition due to an unlucky hardware failure.
Both teams were given consolation after the competition, however, when the Optimus team was awarded the Best Design Report award for the written portion of the competition, and the Prime team was awarded Most Innovative Robot.
M-A's team participants were Dino Bartolome, Gabe Getchell, Tyler Grant, Evan Parker, Rob Lion, Mark Ellsworth, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Jeff Gibboney, Ian Turner, Ian Haddock, and Chris Saunders.
Ian Haddock is a senior at M-A.
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