Engineering students race to build robots for TV fame

Eric Park, Bharathwaj Muthuswamy, and Daniel Lehrbaum (left to right) built the Cal Clutter Collector in less than a day. PHOTO COURTESY DIY NETWORK

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 EE. "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, when Professor Ron Fearing of EECS announced it in his EE192 class, Mechatronics Design Lab. An EECS major who graduated in May and is now working at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Park recruited ME senior Lehrbaum and Muthuswamy. Theirs turned out to be the only Berkeley team to apply. Other contestants might have been scared off. Park and Lehrbaum are veteran robotics contestants who used to be on rival robotics teams in high school, in San Francisco and Palo Alto, and Muthuswamy has several robotics projects under his belt.

Each episode of "Robot Rivals" pits two teams of top-notch engineering students from 14 leading U.S. technical institutes and colleges. The show throws them into a gigantic warehouse stocked with parts and gadgets, then challenges them to design and build a robot that can perform a specific task, such as a "Lunar Rover" robot (with two wheels or less that can traverse a number of different surfaces) or "Paul Bunyan" gadgets (cut down three trees and chop and stack wood). After students design the robot, they get handed surprise household items with bonus points if they can incorporate them.

The Berkeley team designed a street-sweeping robot that incorporated all their surprise elements — a garden hose, snow shovel, twine, watering bucket, and a rake — earning all the available bonus points. Then the "Cal Clutter Collector" had to face Tennessee's "Horned Scooper" in a heated contest that Cal won by just a matchbox car worth 25 points.

The next test, against Southern Illinois University, was to build robots that could propel golf balls at glass targets. But the "Berkeley Bomber" failed to hit as many glass targets as SIU’s "Cleopatra Needle." Muthuswamy, Lehrbaum, and Park came home while the SIU team continued on to the next challenge.

The winning team received $2,000 for their school’s engineering department, and the other 13 teams get $500 scholarships for future robotics competitions for their departments. While the scholarship money was attractive, all three say they entered the contest for the fun of it.

"We thought it would be interesting to go across the country and see Knoxville," says Lehrbaum. "Classes and lectures get routine. It’s nice to get out there and use something you’ve learned."

By Bonnie Azab Powell, Campus Public Affairs

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