If the robots end up taking over, you can probably blame this North County teen
By Byron Kerman
Photographer by Peter Newcomb
For 1,500 teams of high school students across the globe, it’s not football, cheerleading or mascot-stealing that ignites team spirit. It’s the FIRST Robotics Competition. The complex challenge, devised 16 years ago by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, requires students to design and build a customized robot that outperforms its rivals in a series of tasks. This year, the remote-controlled robots will race in a circle, herding huge 40-inch, 10-pound balls and directing them under and over obstacles for extra points.
For several teams of local high schoolers, including Hazelwood Central senior Zach Robinson, an intense six-week period of long nights will climax March 1 in a regional championship at St. Charles’ Family Arena. While screaming kids—many of them in outlandish wigs, hats, costumes and face paint—cheer on their lovingly engineered robots, Robinson will lead the “Robohawks” once more unto the breach.
It must be so awesome to build a robot and see it go from idea to actual construction, and then to compete with it. Exactly. I would like to become a mechanical engineer, and there’s nothing else I can think of that can prepare me like this.
When some people think about robot competitions, they probably think about the robots that tip and flip one another, like in the TV show Robot Wars, but you guys are not allowed to interfere with the other robots, right? This year they’ve made a rule that there’s no intentional bumping of the other robots. You’re trying to out-engineer the other teams—you’re not trying to destroy the other robots.
Are there any females on the team? Yes, and they’re a little more motivated for the task sometimes. We have a lot of boys that lose their focus very fast.
Why do the girls pay better attention? I could not tell you that. It probably has something to do with the psyche.
Do these robots take on a kind of personality? I mean, what with all the work you put into them, say, if your robot is damaged, is it like watching a dog getting hurt? I saw our robot take some damage last year, and it almost brought me to tears. It’s scary. Our robot got hit pretty hard and knocked into a wall. We were like, “What are we gonna do?” It looked really bad from the stands, but it turned out to be OK.
Did your robot have any stickers or signs on it last year? On the back we put a bumper sticker that said, “That’s how we roll.”
