"The Beast" isn't an official name. The four Wood River High School students who built the robot sometimes call it "Dubbies," or just "The Robot," but The Beast seems to be the name they use most often.
Whatever they call it, The Beast and its creators took a trip to Dallas, Texas, in April to compete in the Robotics World Championships. They finished with a record of three wins and five losses, an accomplishment the team and their instructor are quite proud of.
"Against that kind of competition, I was thrilled," said Kevin Lupton, architectural and mechanical design teacher at Wood River High School. "Considering it was our first year—a lot of those teams have been going there for seven years."
The competition pitted the robotic skills of 440 teams, representing 13 countries, against each other. The Wolverines qualified for the world event by winning a regional competition at Utah State University in January.
The Beast was designed and built by seniors Tyler Wolfley and Rusty Williams and juniors Jason Tracy and John Siegel.
Lupton explained that the competition involves a robot's ability to pick up and move things. The objects used for moving are Nerf-type balls, some of them round and some shaped like footballs.
In competition, a small wall separates competing teams. In timed events, each team's robot picks up the balls and throws or places them on the other side of the wall. Points are scored for each ball placed on the wall or over it.
"The other team is trying to pitch balls, too, so the teams are pitching balls back and forth," Lupton said.
The competition is a bit more complicated than that, though. Two teams form what is called "an alliance" to compete against two other teams. Lupton described the alliance concept as something that is commonly done in business.
"It teaches collaboration, it teaches them to sell themselves, it teaches them to build temporary alliances," he said.
There are both pre-programmed and driver-operated phases for the robots in each competition.
The Beast picks up balls by descending upon them and pulling them onto a tray with a movable lever arm. The tray then throws the balls in a catapult-like action.
Lupton said there are lots of other designs used in competition.
"All the robots did it differently," he said. "They were everything from soup to nuts."
Designing, building and operating The Beast involved the skills and know-how of all four students. Wolfley wrote the operating program, Williams built The Beast, Tracy fine-tuned the mechanical systems and Seigel was in charge of hardware. At the competition, Tracy was the driver, Wolfley the assistant driver, Williams the chief communicator for alliance building and Siegel the assistant communicator.
Lupton and the team said nearly 6,000 people attended the Dallas competition. They described the event as similar in atmosphere to a college basketball game.
"We were sitting right behind the Canadians, and they started a wave and it went all the way across and then came back," Tracy said.
Some of the teams wore native costumes, while the Wolverines settled for green T-shirts. The trip to Dallas was mainly funded by team sponsors Power Engineers and the Hailey Rotary Club.
Team members said they've learned a lot from building the robot and entering it in competition.
Wolfley said he learned basic physics and had to teach himself how to write a computer program.
"I, for one thing, learned how to build a robot," Tracy said. "There's a lot of problems you have to constantly go back to. If you don't think there's a problem, eventually it will show up."
Terry Smith: tsmith@mtexpress.com
Budding engineers at Wood River High School tinker with “The Beast.” From left are Jason Tracy, Tyler Wolfley, John Siegel and Rusty Williams.
Courtesy photos by Kevin Lupton
