Underdog robotics team scores upset

Her name is Lynda 1, and she’s a giant killer.

She also goes by Ankylosaurus, referencing a genus of low-slung armored dinosaur more common during the Cretaceous Period, about 66 million years ago. In other words, she's not much to look at. 

But tough. Sanger tough.

Her creators, team Uni-Rex, proved that over the weekend, trouncing most of the competition at the Fifth Central Valley Regional FIRST Robotics Competition held at Madera South High School. It started Friday and ended Sunday. 

Somehow, the first-year Sanger High team defied the odds, placed second in the competition and even scored the Rookie All-Star Award. The team is seeded No. 6 in the FIRST World Championship 2016 on April 27-30 in St. Louis, Mo. to take on the No. 1 seed sponsored by NASA, Google and Dropbox.

The mostly freshman and sophomore Apaches treated the March 11-13 event like the most important showdown to date in 2016 — a high-stakes battle between the best robotics teams in the region. Their training, preparation and ability to exhibit grace under pressure meant the difference between utter annihilation by vastly more seasoned teams or a respectable finish. Fortunately for them, they achieved the latter.

And they did it despite facing teams that have years of experience and, some would say, odd traditions that come from years of toiling to create metal devices that respond remotely to programming and human commands. For instance, one team decided to compete with neon green hair. Others dressed in strange attire.

“This is a very young team,” said Ramon Cuevas, coach of the Apaches and a science teacher.

The Sanger robot team has such young members because “by the time students are in their junior or senior year, they are pretty well established in the teams/activities they like,” Cuevas said via email. “We were able to convince a handful of freshmen and sophomores to do a ‘trust fall’ into the world of robotics.”

And some fell hard. For instance, water polo player Ethan Schletewitz said he dropped the sport because of a requirement to swim all year long. “Spring is for robotics,” he said.

Schletewitz, team public relations specialist, spent a good hour trying to explain the mechanics, function and capabilities of the robot. At one point early in the competition at Madera South High, the team worked to iron out bugs that plagued Lynda 1. And it appeared every other team faced similar difficulties. Making robots, partly intelligent ones especially, is no simple task.

The competition portion of the tournament lasts two and a half minutes. In 15 seconds of that time, the robot is expected to fire a ball into a vertical hole about the height of a basketball hoop, twice.

“We’re trying to get the program (which powers the robot) to run by itself,” Schletewitz said.

Michael Stokes, vice president of operations at POM Wonderful and a member of the Pathways Program board at Sanger High, worked with his sons Jonathan, an application engineer at JBT Corp. in Visalia, and Mitchel, a student at Buchanan who is also a key member of the Uni-Rex team. They attempted to fine tune the complex firing mechanism on the robot so it would pick up and shoot the ball into the relatively small hole without fail, every single time.

“Right now they’re calibrating the robot,” Jonathan said. Earlier that day, he said the team had trouble with the thick bumpers that ring the flattish, angular robot. They didn’t meet specs. “The robot inspectors said, ‘No go.’”

No big deal. The team fabricated new ones that met specifications. The fancy velvet-wrapped bumpers were scrapped.

Freshman Sophie Pham served as co-driver to Mitchel Stokes, a junior and the only upperclassman on the team. He was the primary driver. Both worked to refine the code before they entered the ring to go head-to-head with other teams and their robots.

The pressure was evident. A nonfunctional robot wouldn’t win a thing. And, in fact, during two practice runs later that day in the arena, facing off against three other teams with at least 300 spectators watching, Lynda 1 would fail. Once she simply stopped responding to commands.

“I think it’s pretty stressful,” Pham said. “We just take it slow. Just take it nice and easy.”

Some gears had disengaged, too, during the early non-competition practice. No problem, said Chris Marshall, a sophomore. “I just tightened it,” he said. For some reason, his teammates called him Chuck. He shrugged when asked why.

Schletewitz, who apparently has the most syllables in a last name on the team, continued to explain the mechanics of the machine and what makes what work. “The robot is a combination of over 2,000 hours (of labor),” he said. 

Schletewitz did more fabricating than anything else. He worried about and adjusted the contraption that reaches out and swallows the soccer-sized ball before directionally spitting it out again upon command.

“Intake is on four polycarbonate rollers with poly (urethane) cord,” he said helpfully.

At one point, teammate Skylar McGee got involved in the explaining thing. McGee, a project programmer, helped design the robot in CAD, or computer-assisted design. “We (initially) made a list of things we wanted to achieve,” he said of the final configuration and function of the robot.

Schletewitz said they customized swerve drive modules, which allow the robot to take off in any direction like a fast-moving bug, and tweaked 221 Robotics Systems components to achieve their running gear. “We stayed up until 4 a.m. a few weeks ago,” he said. And then again until midnight before the tournament in Madera.

For some reason, because of a question about rapid firing a ball, McGee and Schletewitz ran with the concept and again seemingly turned their brain speed up to about 500 mph. Schletewitz said rules say theirs couldn’t include a cartridge with a stack system, firing multiple balls. No, not interesting or difficult enough. Their discussion hinged on making a robot pick up a ball, shoot it, pick up another, shoot it and do it again a third time — all in 15 seconds. 

He failed to mention a time machine. But they did discuss components, heatedly.

Schletewitz said the firing commands all hinged on the robot’s ability to see. It had an “eye” blatantly evident because it was encircled by a ring of bright green LED lights. That vision captures an image of a reflective strip around the vertical basketball hoop, enabling the robot to sense where to shoot the ball at 90 feet per second. Just like human vision.

Almost. But nothing like it.

“You’ve got to make sure everything is perfect,” Marshall said.

Michael Stokes said he’s been doing the robot game with son Jonathan for seven years. He served as a mentor on the Buchanan team, which at one point won a world championship. “It’s a good opportunity to train another group of young engineers,” he said.

While Sanger is new to robotics, it won’t be for long. Hillary Cloud, Sanger Unified’s science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, specialist, said the district is working to build a robotics program not just in the high school but in the middle and elementary schools. “We’ve got 27 robotics teams,” she said. “Every elementary has two teams of six kids.”

“Varsity sport of the mind,” Cuevas said.

So far, the high school team includes five girls and seven boys. “We’re very proud of that (the number of girls),” Cloud said. “A lot of the girls involved got acquainted through our STEM Winter Camp.”

Also involved are Laura VanDiver, Yovina Martinez, Genesis Ramirez and Daniellyse Moreno. Most plan to pursue degrees in engineering. Martinez said the group all got henna tattoos together as a show of empowerment. She said they also went to the Girls World Expo in Fresno on March 6 “just for fun to speak to the girls about our robotics team.”

Other boys include Asif Khan, a fabricator who’s in charge of tools and the extremely important task of keeping the five motorcycle-sized batteries charged. And there are David Gonzalez and David Sanchez, both with their own contributions to the team.

Cuevas explained the name Uni-Rex this way via email: “Back when we were still a loose association of nerds, we struggled with the idea of starting a club, let alone a team. Even then the idea of what we would call ourselves was floating around. 

“There were some interesting ideas that the students had — ‘Venom-Pancakes’ and the ‘APP-Patchies’ were among the more interesting. I told the students not to worry about our name and that it would come to them naturally when they least expect it. Besides, we had more pressing matters at hand.

 “A few weeks later, we were learning how to use a 3D printer and its software. A student suggested we print a model he had found of a T. rex skull with a unicorn horn, so we did. A few hours later, when the print finished, we all stood around and geeked out a bit. A student made the comment, ‘Cool! It’s like a unicorn T. rex.’ Another student said, ‘You mean a Uni-Rex?’ The rest of the kids stood there for a bit mulling over the name. One broke the silence: ‘That’s what we should call ourselves — Uni-Rex!’”

The name Lynda 1 also has a background story. Said Cuevas, the “full name of the bot is Lynda 1: (code name) Ankylosaurous. One of the largest sponsors of our little team is POM Wonderful. They have helped us build this program from a bunch of nerds hanging out after school to a full-fledged FRC Robotics team. 

“As a sign of our gratitude we named the beautiful, optimized, competition robot ‘Lynda 1’ and the no-frills, hardworking practice bot ‘Stuart 1’ after the owners of POM, Lynda and Stuart Resnick. The 1 refers to the first series robot.”

The reporter can be contacted by email at nemethfeatures@gmail.com or by phone at the Herald at (559) 875-2511.