FIRST LEGO League Challenge teams compete across three levels of competition, developing critical skills in teamwork, innovation, and technology. Guided by six core values and a spirit of Gracious Professionalism, participants are evaluated not only on performance but also on collaboration and integrity.
Teams design, build, and program autonomous LEGO robots using the SPIKE Prime hub to complete a series of field missions. In addition, each team tackles an Innovation Project, where they research and present creative solutions to real-world challenges.
As part of Challenge, teams also participate in a research project to identify and solve a relevant real-world problem.
This season, we were asked how we share our hobbies and interests using technology. While we had some initial ideas, we decided to meet with 7 experts in the field of hobbies and leisure to learn more about challenges they face in reaching their audience. They shared insight in their tech usage. Common goals among experts include increasing exposure for their work and attracting a wider audience.
We also surveyed local community members at the Snow Day Festival in Kent to understand potential barriers to trying new activities. Most expressed willingness to explore new hobbies, but half said a lack of time, access, or high costs were obstacles.
After interviewing professionals and collecting surveys, we identified two key issues:
1. Professionals offering hobbies seek to expand their audience
2. Many people are unable to try hobbies because of the time, cost, or access to try them.
To solve these problems, we explored a few ideas. We met with students at the Advanced Telerobotics Lab in the College of Computer Sciences at Kent State University. They agreed to be our season mentors and helped in making the decision for our solution.
Dippin’ Dabble combines a VR experience with a connected hobby-attempting robot, we lovingly named Gerald.
Dippin’ Dabble offers a live VR experience. Users download the app, linking to a humanoid robot remotely. Through their VR headset, they select a hobby and see what Gerald’s camera sees.
Partnering with venues ensures robot availability like Gerald at the symphony or the zoo. Users control Gerald to engage in various activities.
Our prototype Gerald represents Dippin’ Dabbles future. While existing humanoid robots are expensive, we envision the future for Dippin’ Dabble.
We were new to setting this up, so we relied on our mentors for guidance in making Dippin’ Dabbles user experience. Bailey and Sophia collaborated with us to achieve the following goals:
Learning Unity for VR and Connecting to our prototype, Gerald.
Weekly, we dedicated 2 hours at the ATR lab with Sophia and Bailey. We delved into Unity, crafting a rudimentary interactive game. Deciding to divide up, we formed two teams, the VR Experience design team and the Connectivity Programming team.
We wanted to know if other people would like our project as much as we do, so some of us presented the idea to our classrooms. We also designed a flier with a QR card that linked to surveys for feedback.
We consulted agencies offering similar services for insights. I AM Boundless praised our solution, highlighting its potential for aiding individuals with disabilities or sensory issues. Shelly Hall at Kent Free Library noted similarities with their Library of Things program.
We’re planning in April, to keep meeting with Sophia and Bailey at the ATR lab to focus on enhancing our understanding of Python, adding more features to our app in Unity, and adding more controls to Gerald.
Before concluding, we’d like to highlight our outreach and community involvement. Over the summer, we told others about FIRST Lego League by attending local events such as Hudson’s Ice Cream Social and Kent’s Heritage Festival. We also mentored two FLL teams, Royal Robotics (55484) from Dayton, OH who wanted to learn about the forklift design and Technoblades (60473) from Aurora, OH. They are a rookie team this year who were just looking for general advice.
We also volunteered at a FLL Explore Expo in February. We helped Explore teams to find their scheduled events, on time.
We started planning robot improvements right after states last year. The way our robot is currently configured, is with a permanent forklift on the backside and 36 tooth gear powered by a small motor on the front side. Here we are able to connect three different attachments for solving missions.
Over the summer, we worked on what we felt was the ideal robot. We wanted to make our new bot smaller and have better CG.
We decided to make two permanent forklifts and run them at the same time. This proved to be very difficult due to the inaccuracy of the Lego motors. We decided to move away from two and go back to one permanent forklift. We installed a large motor in the forklift to make it strong.
This year we chose to not use the Lego bearings for pivoting the rear of the robot. We tested this and found that the bearings helped exaggerate the drive motor’s inaccuracy. So instead we use two 43.2 mm standard wheels mounted to one 12 long axle. We tested this over 30 times and found that it was within ⅛” accuracy.
Here is a slide of failed attachments. You are welcome to check them out.
You can see in this picture how our tall forklift’s strength was useful in solving the Light Show mission. A first for us this year was using 43.2 mm wheels instead of the 90.2 mm wheels we’ve used for years. This change eliminated slack in our drive system allowing straighter runs.
You can see in the data only one run was off by ¼. With these two big changes to our drive system, we knew we could trust our robot better.
We started using Pneumatics last fall. Our goal was to build a pneumatic engine to power a drone. We couldn’t really figure this out but were able to successfully build a trigger system that activates a pneumatic actuator which drives a gear to solve the speaker mission. With motor limitations, we used the pneumatic system to power this lever.
We chose to use the yaw sensor for part of our programming strategy this year. This sensor has a +/- 3° accuracy so the more you use it, the more your bot could be off course. We try to control this with slow turns and minimize its use.
In September, we all attended the Rockwell automation programming workshop where we spent a lot of time understanding how to create an acceleration program. We sort of got it but we chose to not use it in our robot game as we need to better understand the math here. We had a lot of fun though.
Our original deployment strategy was to drop off expert speakers and audience members in their targets. We found that this would be a lot of wasted back and forth so we decided to send the robot back and forth across the field twice. We now have 7 deployments. Five short distance and two long. We programmed for a total of 465 points and with errors, should end up near 400 points.
This slide shows the game field with 7 deployments showing as large circles. You can see where our robot scores and how much field coverage we have. The red deployment is the hardest as it solves 7 missions in 33 seconds.
When all the programming was finished it was time to start practicing our timed runs as a team. At first we didn’t think we would ever get our times down. We programmed for 91 seconds of autonomous movement so that left us 59 seconds for set up. With seven deployments, that’s about 8.4 seconds of set up for each deployment. After 50 runs we not only added a mission since districts but we got our time down to 17 seconds left at the end of the game.
Our first deployment was done by Grayson, he programmed to pick up two experts and move the camera and sailboat for 30 points.
One really cool thing we did was build attachments that solve multiple missions in one fast deployment. The attachment on the left scores 60 points in 8 seconds and the one on the right scores 30 in 10 seconds. This is our pneumatic attachment.
Here are three of our short range deployments that score 80 points and were pretty fun.
Here are three of our short range deployments.
This is the big one! We worked for months on this one and it still pains us here and there. Our robot set up needs to be so precise on this one. Even with perfect set up, the yaw sensor has a tendency to error causing our robot to miss its turn to target or just lose its bearings all together and spin. We contacted Lego education about this issue and they eventually sent us replacement Spike Hubs. For now, we sometimes take a penalty if it spins. Otherwise this is a 150 point run.
This year has been challenging. We did our best to plan things out and make improvements based on test data. We kept track of this in our engineering notebook and dry erase boards. We are hopeful that our hard work will pay off on the competition floor.
In one season, which begins in August and ends in April, team members are presented with a real-world problem. Much like a science fair, they have to conduct research to identify which aspect of the problem they will address and design a solution to that problem. This often involves inventing a new product or concept, or improving on an existing one. They are allowed to seek help from experts and team mentors.
The amount of time and effort they put into researching the problem, designing the solution and constantly improving is up to each team. However, teams who truly embrace and exhibit FIRST Core values of innovation, discovery, inclusion, teamwork, impact, and fun will advance at competitions.
To compete, each team will put together a presentation and share their innovation projects problem and solution with a demonstration of their actual prototype for their solution. They can accomplish this presentation with show-me posters, fact sheets, dioramas, or whatever else supports their research and findings. Teams are also encouraged to share their projects with their local community members and their outreach is part of their overall performance.
There’s more, they also compete with robots on a FLL Challenge table with complicated missions for their robot to left, pull, push, spin, or leverage. The robot itself must not be more than a square foot, including possible robot attachments. This event can be very high pressure and teams must maintain their gracious professionalism throughout the event.
Logan is a 6th grade student at Biomed Science Academy. He has programmed, built, and run robots, but most of all he loves working on the team presentation. Logan started on a FLL Explore team in kindergarten. Outside of FLL, Logan loves to cook and play video games.
Milo is a 6th grade student at Biomed Science Academy. Milo does most of the robot programming for his team because that is his favorite role to fill, but he also run the robot and help design it and the attachments. This is Milo's 7th year with FIRST. Out of FLL, Milo enjoys baseball, playing video games like lethal company and playing with Legos.
Abhinav is a 6th grade student at Aurora City Schools. For Charged Up, Abhinav mainly works on the scripts and presentation materials.
Aarya is a 7th grader at Aurora City Schools. Aarya designed and built the teams innovation project during his first year as a new member of Charged Up, during the Submerged season. Aarya also assists with the robot building and attachment designs. Aarya enjoys basketball, video games, and Lego as his personal hobbies.
Wesley is in 6th grade and attends St. Patrick School. On team Charged Up, Liam is a robot runner and a programmer. He enjoys the challenge of building attachments and building the mission code. In his free time he enjoys baseball, open-world games, and virtual reality.
Ashvik is a 7th grader at Aurora City Schools. For Charged Up, he is a builder, programmer and robot runner. Ashvik started on a FLL Explore team in second grade. This is his fourth year in FLL Challenge. Outside of FLL, Ashvik loves to play basketball with his friends.
KSS Robotics President
Nathan Sterrett tackle (at) kssrobotics.org
Coach
Josh Crawley igotnolegos@kssrobotics.org
Assistant Coach
Liz Crawley liz@kssrobotics.org
KSS Robotics is located at:
1640 Franklin Avenue, Kent, OH 44240