Rival Robot Squads Share Work Space

In its first year in the First Robotics competition, students from Sauk Rapids-Rice had almost completed their robot and were ready to prepare it for shipping.

Then, just days before the entry deadline, the students and adviser Eric Leblanc, a tech education teacher at the high school, discovered two key parts that make the robot run were gone.

Apollo coach Mark Weimer had extra parts and offered them to Sauk Rapids-Rice, along with the opportunity to share work space and advice in a shop at the St. Cloud high school.

“Everybody competes, but everybody helps each other out,” Weimer said.

The robots should be ready to compete in the First Robotics regional competitions next month. Sauk Rapids-Rice is competing March 10-12 in Duluth, and Apollo will compete March 31-April 2 at Williams Arena in Minneapolis.

Are We Ready To Have Robots Fighting Our Battles

Leslea Mair got a new floor sweeper - a puppy-like robot that happily cleans up crumbs before returning to its corner to recharge. But then she wondered about its cousins - the ones with machine guns strapped to their backs.

When the U.S. and their allies entered Iraq in 2003, they had no robotics fleet. Today, they have 7,000 unmanned vehicles in the air and another 12,000 on the ground.Another 43 countries, including Canada, now have dogs in the global robotic fight.

Mair, a Regina-based documentary film producer for Zoot Pictures, believes people just accept the growing use of drones and self-guiding vehicles without understanding the ethical burden they carry.

"If we wait too long, there won't be (room) for debate," says Mair, whose documentary Remote Control War airs on CBC's Doc Zone on Thursday night.

"There's something a little cold-blooded about targeting someone from the other side of the planet. You actually toss a bomb and someone dies - then you take your kids to soccer. "Some people think it's a really good thing, while "¦ others see there are problems."

Ex-Robotics Team Coach Faces Porn Charges

A West Lafayette man who served as a coach for West Lafayette High School's FIRST Robotics team has been charged in federal court with distributing child pornography.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Indiana, Carl Ross Agnew, 27, is accused of using peer-to-peer software to share photos via the Internet of children engaged in sexual activity.

The charge stems from an investigation that began in September 2010 by the FBI's Cyber Crime Task Force and the Kokomo Police Department.

Area 53- The ERHS Robotics Team

Area 53, The Eleanor Roosevelt High School Robotics team has entered the build season for their first competition of the year, hoping to improve upon the results they received last year.

Going from only a few members in the past to almost fifty this year, this club is hoping the increase in numbers will help their chances of winning at the competition this year. The main competition called F.I.R.S.T. (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) for robotics is held in March and students work diligently for a one month period to design and build a robot that fits the criteria of the challenge. This year, Area 53 has to build a robot that can climb a pole to put inner tubes on a wall. The number of inner tubes put on the wall is the number of points the team receives depending on how high up the robot is able to put the inner tubes.

Members of the club joined at various times during the beginning of the year. Enrollment is open until January, when the build season begins. “We’re always happy to get new members and train them in various aspects of the robotics team, not just the robots and programming,” said captain of the robotics team and ERHS junior Patrick Healey.

Robotics is also about graphic design and has a very heavy business aspect to it as well. The team made T-shirts and buttons as well with their team name on them. Healey admitted as far as the business aspect it was something the team often forgot to focus on. Healey said it is difficult “getting funding, because building these robots are really expensive, it goes up to $10,000 so we generally get grants from various engineering companies around the area.” Luckily, Roosevelt is in an area where there are a lot of engineering firms because of NASA Goddard. “What we do is put up proposals and explain what we want to do, what we want to teach people, what we want to show them and then we use that to get grant money,” Healey explained. The grant money the team recieved would then be used to build better robots.

The increase in enrollment this year was surprising to some of the senior members who remembered having only a dozen or less people on the team the year before. “last year I was the only freshman and I kind of liked it all by myself but this year there's 20 to 30 [freshmen],” said sophomore Jacky Cheng. Others were glad to see a rise in enrollment because this would hopefully give them a chance to do well at the competitions this year. Although there are so many new freshman on the team, that does not mean they are deprived of responsibility. “It can be difficult sometimes being a freshman on the robotics team because the older members, they kind of expect you to know what to do. It's not like they don't help if you don't know it, though,” said freshman Selena Healey.

Advantages Of Robotics

Robotics is a modern technology and today most of the things are being automated with the help of robots. Thanks to the advance technology that the dependence on human beings has been cut to a large extent. Robotics has many advantages and a few limitations.

One of the biggest advantages of automating procedures is the accuracy of results. The chances of a robot going wrong are very minimal and as a process, the whole thing may fail or get executed to perfection. Robotics is being used across several industries like automobiles, medicine, household appliances and several more. The most complicated of machines can be assembled using robotics.

Robotics is also playing fairly an important role in the medicine industry. From preparing drugs to performing simple tasks in surgery. However, the process of actual medicine which involves surgery and others cannot be left to robots and human interference becomes inevitable there.