Edina Robotics FIRST Team 1816 – The Green Machine, played host to approximately 60 guests on Saturday, January 27 at their Honeywell-provided build site in Minnetonka. Education Day attendees included team corporate sponsors, representatives of the Edina Board of Education, Edina High School Site and Parent Councils, teachers, school and district administrators, and parents. Most of the team’s 34 students were on hand to demonstrate and explain how a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics team prepares for competition and to show their progress to date on their 2007 robot.
The team is midway through the six-week intensive build period. Every FIRST team has just six weeks from the time the challenge game is announced in early January until the FedEx truck comes to take the robot to regional competition. Education Day attendees were able to see the team’s machine vision system operate. Using a pan-tilt camera, a gyroscope, and programming code, the team is able to have its robot recognize and head for the game target autonomously. The robot chassis and four-wheel drive train were also in working order for the event. One of the challenges in this year’s game is for one robot in the alliance to be able to lift its two alliance partners’ robots at least 4 inches off the ground at the end of the game for bonus points. The Green Machine’s robot will attempt to perform this lifting maneuver by lowering ramps for its alliance partners to board and then lifting the ramps off the ground using pneumatics. A ramp prototype was available for display. Also on display was the team’s fuel cell pilot project. Edina Robotics was selected to be among the 30 teams (out of 1,300 FIRST teams) to test the use of hydrogen fuel cells. Attendees also watched team members work with design software on the three Computer Aided Design (CAD) computers that the team built.