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August 18, 2003 Vol.74, no. 1F
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| STUDIOUS STARS:
While Park, Lehrbaum, and Muthuswamy really wanted to see Knoxville,
where the show Robot Rivals was filmed, they spent all their free
time doing homework in their Tennessee hotel room and faxing in
the assignments. |
Engineers
race to build robots during fifteen minutes of fame
Building a robot, even a
simple one, is no small task. Some Berkeley engineering classes spend
an entire semester doing just that.
Now imagine that you are in an eight-hour competition to build one that
can, say, quickly collect toys and put them in a box — using only
parts on hand in a warehouse. Sound hard? Not for Berkeley engineering
students Eric Park, Bharathwaj “Bart” Muthuswamy, and Daniel
Lehrbaum, who beat a University of Tennessee team on the Do-It-Yourself
(DIY) Network show “Robot Rivals.”
The biggest challenge, they say, was the television cameras pointed
at them the entire time. “They kept making us take the pieces apart
and do it over more slowly for the cameras,” says Muthuswamy, a
first-year Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Cal. “We
also couldn't swear, which was hard. I won't make fun of actors ever
again.”
Park was the first to hear that “Robot Rivals” was looking
for contestants back in January when EECS professor Ron Fearing made
an announcement in his EE192 class, Mechatronics Design Lab. The rules
required teams to include at least one mechanical engineering, one electrical
engineering, and one computer science student. Park, an EECS major (he
graduated in May) quickly recruited Lehrbaum, a mechanical engineering
major who will graduate in December 2003, and Muthuswamy.
Each episode of “Robot Rivals” pits two teams of top-notch
engineering students from 14 leading U.S. technical institutes and rival
colleges. The show throws the students into a gigantic warehouse stocked
with parts and gadgets, then challenges them to design and build a robot
that can perform a specific task, including a “Lunar Rover”
robot (with two wheels or less that can traverse a number of different
surfaces), “Bomb Retrieval” robot (break through drywall,
then gather eggs into a basket), and “Paul Bunyan” gadgets
(cut down three trees and chop and stack wood). After students design
the robot, they are handed surprise household items with bonus points
if they can incorporate them.
The Berkeley team’s surprise elements were garden tools —
a garden hose, a snow shovel, twine, a watering bucket, and a rake.
They managed to incorporate all of them, earning all the available bonus
points. Lehrbaum, Park, and Muthuswamy designed a street-sweeper type
robot with the shovel in front.
Once built, Berkeley's Cal Clutter Collector had to take on the University
of Tennessee's Horned Scooper in a final competition, with points for
each element of the task. The smaller the toys the robots managed to
scoop up and deposit in a toy box, the more points. The team whose robot
earns the most points in five minutes moves on to the competition's
next round.
Cal beat Tennessee by just a matchbox car worth 25 points. In the next
episode, Berkeley lost to Southern Illinois University in a contest
to build robots that can propel golf balls at glass targets.
They didn't mind losing. “TV is extremely stressful,” says
Lehrbaum.
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