RAGE Robotics

With music thumping and bright lights illuminating the field from overhead, an enthusiastic emcee sporting a bright red Mohawk and a goatee to match whipped the massive crowd into a frenzy. With virtually every seat taken at the 2013 Connecticut Regional FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC), sponsored by United Technologies, it was standing room only as thousands of onlookers—many wearing the brightly colored T-shirts representing their team—clapped and cheered. Larger-than-life mascots—a huge red bulldog and “gearhead gladiators” among them—wove their way through the crowd.

And then, six robots that had been hundreds of hours in the making scooted across the court, controlled remotely by the high school students who had built them from scratch, many under the guidance of UTC mentors. The chrome, rectangular robots hurled Frisbee after Frisbee at the window goals on either end of the field and, half way through the 2 minute and 15 second match, climbed pyramid towers in the center of the court. They were followed by students who physically shot Frisbees at the targets, attempting to add a few extra points to their team’s score as the crowd roared.

Minutes later, the match was over. The winning alliance, made up of three randomly selected teams, was announced to thunderous applause.

To read more of this article, go to the full version…

February 25, 2013 | by Bill Gates

Toward the end of last year, I got to travel to Manchester, New Hampshire, to visit one of America’s most prolific and successful inventors, Dean Kamen. Dean is probably best known to the general public as the inventor of the Segway personal transporter, a two-wheeled self-balancing scooter. But his accomplishments range from innovations in heart stents and the invention of some of the most used medical infusion devices in the world, to work on revolutionizing the wheelchair (using some of the same Segway technology), and developing water purification systems for the developing world.

Going to DEKA Research and Development, Dean’s company, is a bit like visiting a cross between the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory and Edison’s labs. DEKA is housed in converted factory buildings along the Merrimack River in Manchester, and is filled with a remarkable set of scientists, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineers; experts in thermodynamics, particle and combustion physicists, software designers and testers. And  Dean. His energy is amazing, and the scope of his ambition for using technology to solve really tough problems is inspiring.

A couple of the projects were of particular interest to me. DEKA is working on a water purification system that could be of immense use for many urban areas in the developing world. In a partnership with Coca Cola, they are conducting trials and aspire to place thousands of these machines in some of the poorest communities on earth. The project, known as Slingshot, looks to build a system that can take the dirtiest water imaginable, and turn it into perfectly safe drinking water. As they get going with this broad pilot, we’re going to be following it closely at the foundation, where we’ve got a number of projects dealing with water and sanitation underway.

Dean also showed me some of the work they’re doing on development of robotic arm prosthetics that will return functionality for people with amputations to their upper extremities. They call this Project Luke (after Luke Skywalker) and are being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). There was clearly a lot of pride and energy in their progress on this complicated project. It could be hugely beneficial, particularly for wounded veterans.

While I was Dean’s guest, I got to try out that redesigned wheelchair, the iBot. After 30 seconds, I was completely comfortable, even as it balanced at eye-level on two wheels. 

It was an exciting—if brief—visit. I’m a pretty optimistic guy when it comes to the ability of scientific innovation to address seemingly impossible problems. Spending a day at DEKA would convince just about anyone of the possibilities. As a country, we’re lucky to have companies like DEKA, and innovators like Dean. Ground breaking innovation makes the world a better place. And that’s good news for us all.

Learn More

• About DEKA Research and Development
• Watch a video about Slingshot, the water purification project
• FIRST robotics competition sponsored by Dean Kamen

Copyright 2013, The Gates Notes, LLC

Here are links to some useful resources for the 2013 FRC competition: Ultimate Ascent!

Game Manual
Team Updates
Game Q&A
Season News and Email Blasts
Game Simulator software (Catalyst 2013)
Software Installation notes
Programming Documentation
WPILib Programming
C++ Updates
Driver Station

Password for any files still encrypted: sAucersFlyRobotsClimb!

Serial number for LabVIEW FRC 2013: S14X86763

Every year, RAGE sponsors a tournament for local FLL (FIRST Lego League) teams. These teams are made up of 4–10 middle school students and mentors. Each team designs a robot made of Lego to carry out specific missions on a tabletop field. They also research and create a presentation related to each year’s theme. This year we were fortunate to also have members from the Athena’s Warriors FRC team helping with all aspects of the day.

On Saturday, December 1, we had 18 teams compete for a chance to go to the state championship being held at Central Connecticut State University on Sunday, December 9. We also tried out a new venue—Rockville High School—instead of the usual middle school facility, and it turned out great. Things went relatively smoothly and everyone we’ve had feedback from thoroughly enjoyed the day.

To check out pictures from the competition, head over to the Photo Gallery. Ken from RAGE and Anna from Athena’s Warriors spent much of the day searching for the perfect shot.

We get a lot of comment spam here, but none of it makes it past our filters and moderation. However, every so often a gem comes through that I have to chuckle at. We just had a comment that, in part, said, “You controlled to hit the nail upon the highest…” Hmm. I suppose the automatic translator he used to go from whatever his native tongue is to English didn’t quite grasp the phrase, “You hit the nail on the head.”

Algorithms enable robot to navigate and view propellers and other complex structures.

Algorithms developed by MIT researchers enable an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to swim around and reconstruct a ship’s propeller.
Image: Franz Hover, Brendan Englot

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For years, the U.S. Navy has employed human divers, equipped with sonar cameras, to search for underwater mines attached to ship hulls. The Navy has also trained dolphins and sea lions to search for bombs on and around vessels. While animals can cover a large area in a short amount of time, they are costly to train and care for, and don’t always perform as expected.

In the last few years, Navy scientists, along with research institutions around the world, have been engineering resilient robots for minesweeping and other risky underwater missions. The ultimate goal is to design completely autonomous robots that can navigate and map cloudy underwater environments — without any prior knowledge of those environments — and detect mines as small as an iPod.

Now Franz Hover, the Finmeccanica Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and graduate student Brendan Englot have designed algorithms that vastly improve such robots’ navigation and feature-detecting capabilities. Using the group’s algorithms, the robot is able to swim around a ship’s hull and view complex structures such as propellers and shafts. The goal is to achieve a resolution fine enough to detect a 10-centimeter mine attached to the side of a ship.

“A mine this small may not sink the vessel or cause loss of life, but if it bends the shaft, or damages the bearing, you still have a big problem,” Hover says. “The ability to ensure that the bottom of the boat doesn’t have a mine attached to it is really critical to vessel security today.”

Hover and his colleagues have detailed their approach in a paper to appear in the International Journal of Robotics Research.

(Continue to the MIT News Office to read the rest of this article.

By Anne Ju

The human hand is an amazing machine that can pick up, move and place objects easily, but for a robot, this "gripping" mechanism is a vexing challenge. Opting for simple elegance, researchers from Cornell, the University of Chicago, and iRobot Corp. have created a versatile gripper using everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon, bypassing traditional designs based on the human hand and fingers.

They call it a universal gripper, as it conforms to the object it’s grabbing, rather than being designed for particular objects, said Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science. The research is a collaboration between the groups of Lipson, Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago, and Chris Jones at iRobot.

"This is one of the closest things we’ve ever done that could be on the market tomorrow," Lipson said. He noted that the universality of the gripper makes future applications seemingly limitless, from the military using it to dismantle explosive devices or to move potentially dangerous objects, robotic arms in factories, on the feet of a robot that could walk on walls, or on prosthetic limbs.

Here’s how it works: An everyday party balloon filled with ground coffee—any variety will do—is attached to a robotic arm. The coffee-filled balloon presses down and deforms around the desired object, and then a vacuum sucks the air out of the balloon, solidifying its grip. When the vacuum is released, the balloon becomes soft again, and the gripper lets go.

Coffee, Jaeger said, is an example of a particulate material, which is characterized by large aggregates of individually solid particles. Particulate materials have a so-called "jamming transition," which turns their behavior from fluid-like to solid-like when the particles can no longer slide past each other.

This phenomenon is familiar to coffee drinkers who have ever bought vacuum-packed coffee—hard as a brick until the package is unsealed.

"The ground coffee grains are like lots of small gears," Lipson said. "When they are not pressed together they can roll over each other and flow. When they are pressed together just a little bit, the teeth interlock, and they become solid."

Jaeger explained that the concept of a jamming transition provides a unified framework for understanding and predicting behavior in a wide range of disordered, amorphous materials. All of these materials can be driven into a "glassy" state where they respond like a solid yet structurally resemble a liquid, and this includes many liquids, colloids, emulsions or foams, as well as particulate matter consisting of macroscopic grains.

"What is particularly neat with the gripper is that here we have a case where a new concept in basic science provided a fresh perspective in a very different area—robotics—and then opened the door to applications none of us had originally thought about," Jaeger said.

As for the right particulate material, anything that can jam will do in principle, and early prototypes involved rice, couscous, and even ground-up tires, Amend said. They settled on coffee because it’s light but also jams well, Sand did better on jamming but was prohibitively heavy. What sets the jamming-based gripper apart is its good performance with almost any object, including a raw egg or a coin—both notoriously difficult for traditional robotic grippers.

The project was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

(Originally published by Cornell Chronicle Online.)

By Frances Taylor – Staff Writer
East Hartford – posted Sun., Mar. 25, 2012

Fresh from a trip to Montreal, the RAGE Robotics team of East Hartford is getting ready for the regional championships that will take place March 30–31. This year, the students have constructed a basketball-shooting robot that will compete in the “Rebound Rumble” at the Hartford Convention Center.

RAGE, which stands for Robotics And Gadget Engineering, is a team made up of students from East Hartford, Manchester, Rockville and Tolland high schools; CIBA students; engineering mentors; teachers; and parents. The team, now in its 18^th year, designs and builds a robot that is used in competitions throughout the year.

During a recent meeting at East Hartford High School, the team talked about their Montreal trip and prepared for the upcoming competition. “We had six weeks to build a robot that can shoot a basketball into a hoops set at three different levels,” said William Champ, a member of the drive team for the robot. During the competition, teams shoot baskets at the ends of an eight-hoop field during a series of two minute, 15-second matches. The teams also compete for honors and recognition that reward their design excellence, competitive play and sportsmanship. Teams are also recognized for the partnerships they form with schools, businesses and communities.

The team was one of only four teams from the U.S. that participated in the Montreal event. The group placed seventh overall, and won an award from the judges for their graciousness and professionalism toward other teams. “We helped another team that was having problems with their equipment, and they ended up placing higher than we did,” said Alex Carr, the team treasurer.

Interest in robotics has grown in recent years, with new teams and national and international interest growing. Brook Jackson, the team’s vice president, has been on the robotics team for the past four years. “It’s very creative,” Jackson said. “You meet a lot of new people, people from across the country and even from other countries, and you can relate to them because you all have the same interest commitment.”

Northeast Utilities is the sponsor of the Connecticut Regional at the Hartford Convention Center. A live web cast of the event can be seen on the website www.shsrobotics.org/webcast.html. Visit www.ragerobotics.com for further information.

Reposted with permission, ReminderNews.

By Jennifer Coe – ReminderNews
Suffield – posted Thu., Feb. 23, 2012

Teams from all over Connecticut and as far away as Lake Ronkonkoma, N.Y., were prepared to battle it out on Feb. 18 at the 11th Annual Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage, a FIRST Robotics competition. FIRST Robotics is a national program high schools everywhere are plugging into which emphasizes the skills learned in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Hosted by Team No. 176, otherwise known as “Aces High Robotics,” at Suffield High School, the gymnasium was throbbing with excitement as a D.J. blared dance music and teams assembled with their robots, each making last-minute adjustments to their creations. Each team was given a mere six weeks to assemble, prototype, and test their robot prior to bringing it to the Shakedown.

The goal? Be able to pick up and throw a basketball into a basket. That is easier said than done, and all the teams took a different approach to making it happen.

“Ours has a custom drive base with drop omni-wheels,” said team member Robert Hunt of South Windsor’s Bobcats. “We have a tower that pivots around its center.”  The team of about 34 students spent more than 120 hours on its robot.

“We’re using a catapult and pneumatics,” said Victor Hipolito, a member of “Buzz Robotics,” from Enfield. “Buzz” has 21 team members, and they were proud to say that they “make it the biggest that we can.” According to Hipolito, they have one adult mentor for every student, making it a very one-on-one learning experience.

“Our robot sucks up the ball on the front and then we have pneumatics that pop it up to the top rollers,” said Emily Davidson, of East Hartford’s “Rage Robotics.” “The challenge is to make it in the basket.” “Rage” has 30 students on its team.

All the teams were nervous about whether or not their robot would function as planned in the heat of battle.

The competition began with the first couple of match-ups of four bots, each controlled by a team of drivers. Extra points were given for being able to traverse the bridges in the center of the playing field. Only a few baskets were scored. Match number three met with some technical difficulties and after a few games of “rock, paper, scissors” and a spontaneous dance-a-thon, the robots were ready to roll again. Each battle for baskets only lasted 2 minutes and 15 seconds, barely enough time for some of the teams to find their bearings on the game field.

After several heats and a full day of competition, winners were chosen, and in the end the teams with the largest number of points were  No. 716 – The Who’sCTEKS of Falls Village; No. 176 – Aces High of Windsor Locks; and No. 2168 – Aluminum Falcons of Groton.  All three winners will be moving on to the FIRST CT Regional Competition to be held in Hartford on March 29.

Reposted by permission, ReminderNews.

After 12 years located at 701 Main St., East Hartford, the award-winning robotics team that brought home a National Championship in 2002 and placed third in the world in 2005 and 2007 will have to find a new home. Thanks to the generosity of Mary Lee Stiegler, the RAGE team was given a home in the back of the old A&P grocery store on Main St. in East Hartford back in 1999. This approximately 9,000-square-foot donation allowed the team to build a full-size playing field to practice on when competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition. It also allowed us to hold our regularly scheduled meetings there, teach classes in C++ and SolidWorks (CAD program), and have fun.

We were able to impact the lives of hundreds of students through the years and promote the values of gracious professionalism as they learned how to master the intricacies of robotics, team building, cooperation, and engineering. These STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields are critical components in today’s society. We wish to publicly thank Ms. Stiegler for her generosity as we search for a new home.

RAGE is a legally incorporated 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math through participation in the FIRST robotics program (www.usfirst.org).

In addition to designing, building, and competing with large 130-lb., five-foot-tall robots, the RAGE team also fosters the importance of community service. Each year, the RAGE team hosts a FIRST Lego League Tournament that provides the opportunity for 24 elementary school teams to compete with their Lego Mindstorms robots. The team also sorted, boxed, and stored over 40,000 toys collected during the State Police Stuff-a-Cruiser program. These toys were then distributed to patients and families undergoing treatment at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford. We have collected toys for the KIDSAFE CT Christmas party and provided lots of baby items, blankets, and so forth for My Sisters’ Place, a shelter for women and children.

The RAGE team (http://www.ragerobotics.com is actively seeking a new benefactor that can provide a donated home for this award-winning team. Ideally, we need space that would have several rooms that could be set up as classrooms: one for computers (6–7 workstations), one for spirit , and a larger room capable of holding 40–50 people for our team meetings. We also need a workshop space where we can use our several small tools (drill press, sander, table saw, band saw, etc that allow us to build our field and robot. Ideally there would be space to build a playing field (30’ × 75’) where we could practice throughout the season.

We meet typically all year round with a short break in the summer. Our meetings are traditionally on Wednesday nights at 6:30 P.M. to allow for students from all the different high schools to attend. Though based in East Hartford, RAGE currently has high school students from East Hartford, Rockville, Tolland, Bolton, Manchester, and Ellington.

Please contact the president of our Board of Directors, Maire Cusson (maire@ragerobotics.com with any information. You may also contact team leader Chuck Nystrom (chucknye@msn.com).