The University News

Issue date: 4/21/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Derek Simons Merve Cankaya, member of the UMKC Robotics Team, worked on the final preparations for the competition.

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.

Continued...

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