Students gear up for Botball Students gear up for Botball (April 22, 2005)

By Kathy Schrenk

Some local high school students are spending their spring break traveling to a tropical clime or jetting off to Europe.

But not Austin and Travis Schuh. The brothers, along with several of their Mountain View High School classmates, are spending the week at home playing with Legos.

These first- and second-year students are part of a team that will be competing in Santa Clara Saturday against 33 others from the Bay Area in a robotics competition called Botball. They've spent all of this week and parts of the last six weeks building two robots, dubbed Policeman and Streetsweeper, Austin Schuh said.

The competition, sponsored in part by the NASA-Ames Research Center, lets kids from schools all over the Bay Area work with sophisticated sensors -- and Legos -- to build self-guiding robots that compete in a game that's part capture-the-flag and part Foosball, but all high-tech.

The students use a kit given to them by Botball organizers, which includes hundreds of Lego blocks, several sensors that detect light, color and solid objects, and processor boards that serve as the robots' "brains." The students can't use anything that's not in the kit, and once the match starts, the team members can't give the robot any assistance; it's totally on its own.

That's the most challenging part of the contest, Austin said. "Sometimes what you tell it to do isn't what you want it to do," he said.

During the competition, the robots have 90 seconds to move around a tabletop course that includes obstacles for the 'bot to go around or over, objects for it to pick up and tasks for it to complete. It's up to the students to figure out, using the Lego kit and computer commands in a version of the C programming language, how to get the robots to discern colors and shapes and perform functions in order to get the most points.

Some of the kids specialize in one aspect of designing and building the robot, such as computer programming or Lego architecture. Travis Schuh, for instance, is especially interested in the building aspect.

"I like Legos," the freshman said. "I'm good with doing the Legos."

The competition allows all the kids to experiment with skills and activities that aren't always available in other school activities, said Michael Schuh, dad to Austin and Travis and coach to the whole team.

"Some of them are mechanically inclined, and some are very skilled in programming at this young age," he said. "Some have been programming robots for six years."

But for the kids, it's mostly about having fun, he said. "The team members really have a good time."

For more information about Botball or to get involved, check out www.losaltosrobotics.org or contact Michael Schuh at 604-1460.

Saturday's competition, at the Leavey Center at Santa Clara University, is open to the public. Head-to-head contests start at 2 p.m.
E-mail Kathy Schrenk at kschrenk@mv-voice.com

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