Building a better robot

The Woots and Snarks had temporarily gotten the better of student PJ Lassiter.

The Sonoma Academy junior bellied up to the testing table dotted with white and black cans, turned his robot to “on” and let it go. He immediately began biting his nails.

“I was way more nervous than I thought I would be,” he said. “When it was my turn, I was shaking.”

The Woots and Snarks, named for the different colored cans, were there to trip up Lassiter’s team and other competitors during the fifth annual robotics contest sponsored by Santa Rosa Junior College and Agilent Technologies.

Forty-two students from the JC, Sonoma Academy and Santa Rosa High School competed in teams Friday in two separate challenges.

“Woots and Snarks” required robots built over the spring semester to know white cans from black, and sort them by color. The second contest, dubbed “The Pit of Despair,” demanded that robots traverse a trough filled with packing peanuts and climb a steeply slanted exit wall.

Students, who had been been building the robots for months, were allowed very little tweak time between events.

Kris Magris and partner Jeronimo Hernandez-Conti made the most of their opportunity. They got a perfect score in their second and final Woots and Snarks run after a disappointing opening attempt.

The pair took home first place in the masters division.

It is not just fun and games for Magris, a JC student who hopes to go into robotics as a career.

“We are behind,” Magris said of students in the United States. “We are doing this but the kids in Japan are doing walking robots.”

Darci Rosales, coordinator of the Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement program at the JC, warned of a crucial shortage of engineers, “especially of engineers from our own four year universities.”

“We need to nurture the investment we have made in our students in grades (kindergarten) through 12 and produce our own engineers,” she said

Most of the competitors Friday have engineering as a career goal, but JC student Allen Schrader got right down to business.

“I’m going to the highest bidder,” he said.

Schrader and teammate Sarah Austin named their gizmo “The Love Tap” because of its paddle-like mechanism that swatted the Woots and Snarks cans in place rather than embracing them like many of the competitors’ models. They took third place in the novice division.

“It’s a lot of work for three minutes of competition,” Austin said.

Later, William Jaeger chugged a Vitamin Water and bobbed his head like he had just nailed the winning shot in a basketball game.

The robot built by Jaeger, along with teammates Chris Levesque and Liberty Moyer, had cleared “The Pit of Despair” in five seconds en route to a first place finish in the novice division.

Not bad, considering that a team of Agilent engineers with more than 30 years cumulative experience had just been thwarted by the challenge.

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com.