SEARSPORT, Maine — Glitchen the robot lurched around the art room at Searsport District High School on Wednesday afternoon, the pneumatic system that moved its arms up and down wheezing and its red light blinking.
Something didn’t sound quite right, however, and a couple of high school students leapt into action to diagnose and fix what was wrong. Time was of the essence: The school’s rookie robotics team was allowed just a handful of hours to fine tune the robot before its next scheduled competition this weekend at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire.
“The voltage from the batteries keeps dropping,” Logan Staples, 17, of Stockton Springs explained. “If it happens during the competition, it really wouldn’t be good.”
The stakes are high, but the students seemed confident they could fix the ailing Glitchen. After all, the 17-student team built the 113-pound robot themselves in an intensive six-week push earlier this winter, with the help of adult mentors and other Maine schools that already have taken part in the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, robotics program. The nationwide program has the mission of inspiring young people to be leaders in science and technology.
Last weekend, Searsport’s Viking Landers team competed in Lewiston and placed 14th out of 31 teams from around Maine. It was a good first-time result for the Viking Landers, who wore Viking hats crafted out of duct tape to cheer on their robot and its student drivers and programmers.
“There’s an element of NASCAR and an element of worldwide wrestling,” said parent Sharon Catus, who helped start the program and found a total of $12,000 in grant funding this year. “There’s a pageantry to it.”
She said SDHS, with a student body numbering just 170, held its own against larger schools in the Lewiston competition. The Viking Landers hope to do even better in New Hampshire.
Tori Staples, 15, of Stockton Springs — Logan’s younger sister — said she helped write code to make Glitchen move and watched nervously as the robot competed in a game called Recycle Rush. In the game, three robots work together to stack plastic recycling totes and pick up litter.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “But when we got there, I thought, this is amazing. I know that we can actually accomplish something.”
Tori said she plans on being either a mechanical or a computer engineer when she grows up and has had a lot of fun learning how to build a robot from the ground up.
“There’s nothing bad that will ever come out of robotics,” she said. “There’s going to be something for everyone to do. You’ll get to meet new people and make friends at the competition. Everyone’s going to feel involved. It feels great, honestly.”