Nelson County ATC team wins top honors at state robotics competition
The Nelson County ATC team pose with their robot at the 13th annual WKU Kentucky Bluegrass Robotics competition. The team won their third consecutive first-place trophy. Click image to enlarge.
By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette
Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012 — A team of students from the Nelson County Area Technical Center recently took top honors at the 13th annual Kentucky Bluegrass Robotics Competition.
The competition pitted 15 teams from a dozen school against one another in a “Robot Pentathlon.” Each team’s robot had to compete in five events, including a robot sprint, throw a ball as far as possible, lift a basketball as high as possible, complete an obstacle course, and a robot-vs.-robot tug of war.
For the Nelson County students, this is the team’s third-straight first-place win in the competition. The team is led by IT teacher Charlie Cantrill.
The annual contest is sponsored by the WKU Department of Engineering. The competition provides secondary school students with a challenging engineering design experience and secondary school teachers with guidance in teaching engineering topics.
Taylor White pilots the Nelson County team’s robot through an obstacle course at the WKU robotics competition. Click to enlarge.
WKU provides remote control equipment, motors and additional identical equipment for each team’s robot. Each team of students design their own robot — and ingenuity the teams exhibited at the competition was impressive.
In the event where teams shoot a practice golf ball for distance, some teams designed catapults, others sling shot-like devices. The Nelson County team used surgical tubing to create a high power sling shot that shot the ball so far it hit high on the wall on the far side of the competition area.
In the robot tug-of-war, several teams had wheels with special gripping surfaces or teeth to grab the carpeted floor of the competition area. The Nelson County team’s strategy was to use a winch driven by the main drive wheels. A servo raised the robot’s main wheels off the group with a foot that also held the robot firmly in place; when the winch was activated, it pulled the competing robot backwards and over the line. The Nelson team dominated the tug-of-war event.
While winning the event was an honor the students earned via their hard work, Cantrill said the process of designing and building an effective, attractive robot without spending a lot of money, and being able to document their work is a good lesson for the students.
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