SWAT-BOT team sweats to beat deadline

Somehow the robot -- a silvery aluminum framework with guts and gears hanging out all over -- ended up in front of the shop doors in the University of Washington's Electrical Engineering Building. So that's where three sleep-deprived student engineers descended on it.

They and other members of the SWAT Robotics team -- a collaboration of 15 UW students and about 20 Roosevelt High School students -- had been working day and night trying to meet a tight deadline to get their robot to work.


		Mike Urban / P-I
	University of Washington engineering students Anna Tonkonogui and Fred Sayre work on the SWAT-BOT. Their team found problems recently with the drive mechanisms after a test run.

When two other members of the team tried to get through the shop's doorway, tensions flared.

"Why are you in front of the door?" one student challenged.

There was no answer at first from the three working on the robot. Then one replied with ice in his voice, "Go around to the other door."

One of the students seeking entry turned away. But the other barged through the impromptu work area, high-stepping over parts and legs.

There was a moment of stiff silence among those on the floor. Then their energy turned back to the robot and its wires, wheels, gears and electronics.

They were too pressed for time to have a proper argument.

The team was nearing the end of a strict six-week time frame for designing and building a robot to compete in the annual FIRST Robotics Competition, a national series of contests involving 800 teams from around the country that will culminate for team members in April with a regional competition at the UW and perhaps a championship event in Houston.

A game with a purpose

A few days before the mid-February incident at the door, UW engineering professor Alex Mamishev had ordered the team members into "flaming red" mode, which meant everyone had to respond at any time of the day or night to robot-related problems and tasks.

"If we don't have (the robot) working in 10 days," said Mamishev, the team's lead mentor, "then this project is a disaster."

Each year for the past decade, the New Hampshire-based FIRST ("For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") has created a new game to be played using robots. In this year's game, the teams will stack and collect plastic storage containers on their side of a specially designed playing field. The teams are randomly paired in alliances, which face off against other alliances on either side of a large ramp in the center of the field.

The games began 10 years ago when a group of inventors, spearheaded by Dean Kamen -- the inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, among other things -- set out to inspire a new generation of students to become engineers and inventors.

Although focused on exposing high school students to science, the event also gives university students the chance to boost their resumes by developing skills as team leaders and mentors. Although most teams are made up of engineering professionals and high school students, about 57 teams such as SWAT involve university students.

In addition to learning team-building and project-management skills under strict deadlines, the UW students can get up to eight college credits for the project.

Participating UW and Roosevelt High students carried on with their regular lives, more or less, until the rules for the game were released. This year, that happened Jan. 4. In the six weeks that followed, involvement for most students steadily increased from several hours a day to 24-hour periods of intense construction.

'Totally insane'

"I haven't gone home for the past three days," Terence Tam, a member of the UW side of the team, said Jan. 31 while stripping a broken machine for making parts.

UW student Tristan Burch added: "I think we have a good design. If we get all the parts working perfectly, we have a really good chance of winning."

But nearly two weeks later on Feb. 12, the team was still behind schedule. There were only a few days left before they had to put the robot in a box, whether it worked or not, and ship it to a storage facility. The team wouldn't be able to see the robot again until its first competition in April.

"We deploy so much new technology on this robot that it's scary," Tam said. "If it doesn't work, a lot of people will be disappointed. . . . But as long as we learn something from this competition, it will be worth it."

The SWAT team's robot uses several electric motors, air pumps, wheels, belts and on-board computers that coordinate some operations and run the robot on their own for a short time, as well as hundreds of original parts -- from gears to hooks -- manufactured by the team.

The technology and engineering involved were more than Roosevelt High student Chris Zweigle expected.

"I didn't realize there was so much going on in the robot," he said, adding that the team had stagnated for a short time after coming up with the design. "Now we're rushing to get it built on time. We're stuck trying to wing it and hope all of our designs work out."

UW team member Alanson Sample was plying his dexterity on the part of the robot that will lift the plastic containers -- aluminum frame, two white plastic chains, nuts and bolts.

"We're in that relaxed, spaced out, totally insane stage where we can just ease into our stress," he said.

Done, but reliable?

On Thursday, Feb. 20, the robot was packaged and shipped to a warehouse in south Seattle.

Anna Tonkonogui, president of the UW side of the team, said, "It will do everything it's supposed to do." Although she wasn't sure how reliably.

"It was a very complex robot," she said. "Exactly the kind of thing that (experienced) teams advise you not to build." Since the robot was shipped, team members have been "basically sleeping," she said.

She explained that the team's robot is designed to steal stacks of plastic containers from the other side of the playing field. The big trick, however, is that the other side of the field is blocked by a bar and a ramp.

The SWAT robot uses a mechanism to let the bar, which is a little more than a foot off the ground, pass through the center of the robot while it carries a stack of containers over the bar. "We do have a strategy that I haven't seen anywhere else," said Nik Krumm, president of Roosevelt High's side of the team. "I'm actually quite proud of what we did this year."

And although the team has a lot of work left -- from manufacturing spare parts to building a Web site and creating an animation of their robot design -- the next big day for them is April 3, the first day of the Pacific Northwest Regional competition at the UW. At that time, teams will get 12 hours to fix and refit parts and test the robot on the actual playing field.

If the SWAT team makes enough points at the regional event, it will advance to the championships in Houston on April 10.

"I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens," Krumm said. "We're pretty sure that . . . there will be something there that we completely overlooked, some radical team strategy will surface. It'll be interesting."

WE'LL BE BACK

This is the P-I's second story tracking the progress of the SWAT Robotics team at the University of Washington. The first story can be found at seattlepi.com/local/104225_robots15.shtml.

The P-I will check in with the team again when it enters the 2003 FIRST Robotics Competition regional event April 3 at the UW. The national championships are set for April 10 in Houston.