Over the past four months, Lorenzo had flourished, learning a new set of acronyms and raising his math grade from an F to an A. He had grown up rebuilding car engines with his brother and cousin. Now he was ready to build something of his own. The team had found its mechanics man.

It was the end of June. Lorenzo Santillan, 16, sat in the front seat of the school van and looked out at the migrant farmworkers in the fields along Interstate 10. Lorenzo’s face still had its baby fat, but he’d recently sprouted a mustache and had taken to wearing a fistful of gold rings, a gold chain, and a gold medallion of the Virgin Mary pierced through the upper part of his left ear.

The bling wasn’t fooling anyone. His mother had been fired from her job as a hotel maid, and his father had trouble paying the rent as a gardener. They were on the verge of eviction for nonpayment of rent. He could see himself having to quit school to work in those fields.

“What’s a PWM cable?” The sharp question from the van’s driver, Allan Cameron, snapped Lorenzo out of his reverie. Cameron was the computer science teacher sponsoring Carl Hayden’s robotics program. At 59, he had a neatly trimmed white beard, unkempt brown hair, and more energy than most men half his age.

Together with his fellow science teacher Fredi Lajvardi, Cameron had put up flyers around the school a few months earlier, offering to sponsor anyone interested in competing in the third annual Marine Advanced Technology Education Center’s Remotely Operated Vehicle Competition. Lorenzo was one of the first to show up to the after-school meeting last spring.

The school PA system crackles, and an upbeat female voice fills the bustling linoleum-lined hallways. “Anger management class will begin in five minutes,” says the voice from the administration building. “All referrals must report immediately.”

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It’s a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface.

The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

The track consists of sand roads and fields containing bushes and rocks. The robots must run outside the sticks from start to finish without human assistance as fast as possible.[1 Youtube movies and pictures from the 007 and 008 competitions are available.

There certainly isn’t a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late ’50s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal’s office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy jeans and XXXL hoodies are the norm.

This contest is organized to promote research results and stimulate further interest in bio-inspired robotics control. The participation to the contest is open to anyone and free of charge.

Contestants can download a free version of the Webots software for simulating a robotic scenario where two rat robots compete for survival in a maze-like environment. The developed robot controllers can be transferred in real e-puck robots roaming an interactive LEGO maze.  This competition is now widely used for teaching.

An annual robot contest which started in 00 for university, college and polytechnic students in the Asia-Pacific region. Under a common set of rules, participants compete with their peers from other countries with hand-made robots.

This contest aims to create friendship among young people with similar interests, as well as help advance engineering and broadcasting technologies in the region. The event broadcasts in countries/region through ABU member broadcasters.

This little Berkeley’s Toy store is a paradise for kids strolling around the College Avenue strip.  It’s also an “seventh on heaven” for an old man like me to experiment the changes of toys and other child’s playthings through the years.

This is not really a big store, but enough for this store to carry cute toys of all ages. They carry figurines, antiques, playsets and assorted stuffed-animals of kinds including “that popular Sanrio kitty with the BIG head.”

I was checking out the action-figure collections and they carry the latest including Batman, Transformer, Incredible Hulk and Iron Man just to name a few. With Iron Man being one of the hottest recent movies, the store has his flashy hot rod car set. The $30.00 famous hot-rod is the same exact car in the movie and also comes with the Iron Man figurine as the driver. I don’t plan to open the superhero’s hot-rod and play and destroy that hopeful collector’s item in the living room. I plan to put his toy hot rod on my mantel as a cool display.

I found some great treasures here, as in a past life I used to throw bucketloads of money away on die-cast metal Japanese robot toys.  Now I throw bucketloads of money away on alcohol.  Anyway, back to Boss Robot…

But first-time ‘bot builders quickly hit one of many walls, and often call it quits. Unlike other high-tech hobbies, robot-building requires a workable tool set in a wide range of fields. You need mechanical tools for building frames and mounts, electronics gear for wiring circuitry, and software to write the code that makes everything work together. Few people, starting out, have a strong enough tool set in all three areas to pull off a first robot.

Even having a well-stocked workroom and a hurking PC isn’t enough, because you also need the skill set to use all of these tools well. A strong frame loaded with top-notch electronics just gathers dust without robust software to drive it. The best robotics program written is worthless unless you can load it onto a working microcontroller with good mechanics surrounding it.

Nancy Taylor, a director with the institute, said the goal of the tournament was, in part, to encourage science students to consider a future in robotics. “We want to build a sense of teamwork within each student first, and then challenge them to develop the ability to design, program, engineer and then build a functioning robot,” said Taylor, as she stood in front of more than a dozen student teams waiting to test drive their robots.

“These aren’t hard-wired or remote-controlled robots; they’re all programmed to recognize colors and shapes and to perform a routine that will get them across an obstacle course in the allotted two minutes that each match takes,” she said.

North County was represented by teams from Westview and Oceanside high schools. Each team brought a controller robot and drone robot to the contest.

Tim McFadden, an Oceanside High science teacher, watched as two of his senior students, Pablo Suarez and David Velazquez put their robots through their paces. Botball organizers in San Diego said McFadden has sparked a renaissance in computer science at the Oceanside school. He took four seniors to the competition.

I have done a lot with electronics and with software, but never have I build such a complicated mechanical machine before so I needed to do a lot of research before I started my build.  The best tools I found for this research phase where cnczone and google.  Eventually I decided on a gantry style table because the were the most common and simplest form of table. This thread in particular on cnczone influenced my final build. I didn’t do a very good job at recording the time I spent during this research phase, but it was probably something like 30 hours.

There is no way I’m going to take the time to explain every step of this build procedure, but here is a part list and the price I paid for each one.  I wish this list had existed before I started my build so I would have had an example of the different components you need to build a full CNC router and the approximate cost.

For the next six weeks following the kickoff, called the “build season,” the teams begin to design a robot to play the game, essentially from scratch. Team members spend the time designing strategies to play the game, drawing up ideas for robot parts, working with size and weight constraints, and finally, building and assembling their robot. Other challenges include gaining driver experience, building the electronics for the robot, and programming it.

After the build season has ended (usually the 3rd full week of February), teams must ship their robot to where their first competition is. Competitions for FIRST consist of 37 regional competitions, and one championship event. Regionals typically involve between 20–65 teams.

Teams are randomly assigned alliances of 3 teams, which are paired into qualification matches, where they earn ‘qualifying points’, the calculation of which changes each year. The game changes every year, but for the most part, they involve some autonomous (computer controlled) robot operation for 10–15 seconds at the beginning of a match, followed by a much longer period (usually 2 minutes) of remote control. Teams use scoring objects on the field to get points, which are evaluated only after the match has completely ended.