Twenty-three Picatinny-sponsored high school robotics teams from area high schools met for the annual regional For Inspiration of Science and Technology (FIRST) robotics competition at Mount Olive High School in Flanders from March 10-12.
For the competition, each robotics team had a six-week build period to deliver a robot that could accomplish the competition's annual objective, which for 2017 is to capture and catapult balls into a target 15-feet high, pick up and carry gears from the front line to the air ship, and at the end of the game, climb a four-foot rope to gain extra points.
Each of the 23 teams has a volunteer mentor from Picatinny.
"We sponsor around 40 robotics teams and each robotics team we sponsor gets a Picatinny mentor," said Shah Dabiri, Picatinny STEM director.
Dabiri, who sponsors two robotics teams, said that the competition is more than a game -- it's a way for students to get hands-on engineering experience.
"You can learn trigonometry all you want in the classroom…but until you sit down at a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) table and have to design a machine that's got robustness and survivability, that's when things like algebra, pre-algebra, trigonometry -- all that stuff comes into play," Dabiri explained.
Picatinny contractor Daniel Steinmark agrees.
"Over the years, I've worked on some advanced topics with them, including control theory with PID (Proportional - Integral - Derivative) loops, ballistics, computer vision, and navigation," he explained.
"But it's much more than just the coding or the tech. It's guiding them to organize their own thoughts into a plan to get things done. It's guiding them to organize their sub-team in a way that gets everyone involved. It's teaching them to communicate, and to learn on their own, and to teach others. It's very close to a real world activity with strict deadlines and insufficient resources. We have lots of failures, but we move on. In the end, we have lots of successes that we can be really proud of."
"It's definitely stressful," said Jared Ruiz, a senior at Clifton High School, who drove his team's robot during the competition and also assisted with the design and mechanical team. "It's a competition and we're trying to work out the kinks, and trying to make our robot perform at its maximum capacity."
Nicole Taylor, a senior at East Orange STEM Academy, said keeping the robot simple was her team's greatest challenge.
"Deciding to make a robot that's simple and not too extravagant. Many robots here have so many things going on and it's kind of compact. We just tried to go for…a simple design that elegant," Taylor said.
Out of 37 teams participating in the FIRST competition, two of the three winning teams were Picatinny-sponsored. Those were team 25 North Brunswick Township High School and team 303 from Bridgewater Raritan High School. Picatinny employee Delfin Jose Quijano mentored team 25 and Michael Scott mentored team 303.
Scott said he spends about 20 hours a week mentoring his team from January through the end of the competition season, which is mid-April. While he originally began mentoring his son's team, Scott continued as a mentor after his son graduated in 2014.
"Students learn several skills: Teamwork, problem solving, working under pressure and working with your hands," Scott explained. "I stayed on because I enjoy seeing the kids learn and gain confidence as they try new things and work with tools they never have. It's very rewarding for me to see the kids grow over the years."
FUNDING
In addition to receiving a sponsor, each Picatinny-backed team also received $1,500 from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and $3,500 from the U.S. Army Research Development and Engineering Center's Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) program office.
"The donation we receive from Picatinny each year is a critical component of our annual budget," wrote Ari Eisner the lead student robotics mentor, or coach, of the Warren Hills High School.
Eisner explained that in a recent presentation to his board of education on the robotics program he highlighted how hundreds of thousands of dollars of scholarship money has been received by Team 219 alumni over the past five years, "scholarships they were eligible for solely due to their participation in our FIRST Robotics team," Eisner wrote.
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