Merve Cankaya, member of the UMKC Robotics Team, worked on the final preparations for the competition.

UMKC Robotics Team picks up

By: Derek Simons

Posted: 4/21/08

Senior David Rink, physics, is slouched behind a table covered with electronic components, looking slightly frazzled. He's the only one using a chair.

Freshman Tim Schallert, electrical computing and engineering (ECE), is writing numbers furiously off to one side in the hotel room as two other ECE majors, Merve Cankaya and Jared Bayne, both seniors, crouch down on the floor peering at graphs on a laptop. They are calibrating the color-recognition data fed from a sensor on the front of their creation, the Monster Truck.

Welcome to UMKC's Robotics Team practice room at the Intercontinental Hotel Kansas City at The Plaza, ground zero for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) Region 5 annual robotics competition and home of many empty, discarded pizza boxes.

Bayne, the team leader, sets up another trial run by placing objects (called "casks") on three separate squares drawn on a large, rigid white mat. (The casks look like soda cans on their sides with pieces of wood attached at each end to hold them up off the ground.) Black lines indicate paths to three more "rooms" on the opposite side of the mat.

"They [the casks] all weigh a different amount," Bayne says. "[The robot] has to pick it up, weigh it and it knows what room to bring it to on the other side of the board based on the weight."

The second, more difficult test is to place the casks correctly in different colored boxes, and 30 university teams from across the Midwest will be practicing all night. The IEEE competition starts at 7:30 a.m., and the Monster Truck is still having trouble differentiating weights.

It sets off across the mat, following the black lines until it arrives at the first cask. Pincers scoop up the mini dumbbell, the robot swivels, carries it across the mat and deposits it precisely on target. Heading back, the robot, guided by black and white line sensors underneath it, follows the path perfectly and arrives at the second cask, which hasn't been positioned in the center of its room.

Monster Truck pauses, studies the situation, and then wiggles itself slightly to the left, before making a successful grab. But it heads back to where it placed the first cask.

"It's having trouble recognizing the heavy one from the middle weight," Schallert says. "We can fix that."

Bayne says in the competition, the weights will be different, so last-minute adjustments will be needed anyway.

The robot heads for the third cask, turning to run along the line, but then it stops. Two front-mounted sensors have "seen" Cankaya sitting at the edge of the mat. She starts laughing as the pincers head for her leg.

Designing a robot from scratch obviously isn't always smooth sailing. The team has worked two semesters on this project. Monster Truck now has four small 8 MHz computers on board.

"It doesn't use real powerful stuff," Bayne says. "The main limitation is the actual chip has a certain number of pins and that limits how many sensors you have. So, if you put a bunch of sensors on here, you have to have a pin for each sensor. That's why we have four [chips] and they have to talk to each other."

Bayne has been building robots for nine years. He just returned with $5,000 from a national wireless design competition held by a large company in California, Lantronix, where he won third place overall, and placed first in the student category for building a WiFi security robot around the board supplied.

"He's really good at it," Schallert says. "I'm along to learn from these people. I can solder and know what components are and I can put together a board, but programming is not my skill yet."

Bayne is sanguine about their prospects for the next morning.

"I think we have a good chance of doing well," he says, "which is better than we've ever done."

This is the fourth year the team has competed. As to last year's results, Cankaya says they try not to talk about it.

"If the robot loses the [black] line, it's over," Bayne says. "You only get two tries, so even if it works 99 percent of the time, there's that one percent. It's really easy for your robot to look like a complete failure."

Competition update: Monster Truck did well on the first Saturday morning run until, for some reason, "it flew off the board with the third cask," according to Bayne.

"Let's just say we didn't finish among the 10 finalists," Bayne said.

dsimons@unews.com