NASA Robotics competition for kids

Two Southern California schools -- Glendale's Roosevelt Middle School & Reseda's Shirley Avenue Elementary School -- captured top honors at a Lego robotics competition sponsored by JPL on Tuesday, Feb. 26.

The winning schools were two of 12 schools that participated in the second annual Southern California NASA Explorer Schools Robotics Competition, held at JPL's von Karman auditorium. JPL is the local NASA partner for 25 schools in Southern California.

The school teams spent months creating small, software-enabled Lego robots for this contest, which encourages students to study math, science, technology & engineering. Students could not use remote controls & had to pre-program their robots to navigate an obstacle course & perform tasks such as retrieving simulated planetary mineral formations -- all within two minutes.

The winning teams:

Elementary Division

First Place: Pirate Tigers

Shirley Avenue Elementary School, Reseda

Second Place: No Fear

North Ridge Magnet School, Moreno Valley

Third Place: Nightmares

Lakeview Elementary School, Huntington Beach

Middel/High School Division

First Place: Robotic Roughriders

Roosevelt Middle School, Glendale

Second Place: Tinkerbots

Kranz Intermediate School, El Monte

Third Place: Terrabytes II

Village Academy High School, Pomona

Other Awards

Robot Design: Las Bellas team

Joyner Elementary School, Los Angeles

Ingenuity: Robotic Roughriders team

Roosevelt Middle School, Glendale

Good Neighbor: Nightmares & Spikers teams

Lake View Elementary School, Huntington Beach

Against All Odds: Robotic Tigers team

Johnson Magnet School, San Diego

Against All Odds: Cybernetic Minds

Jack Weaver School, Murietta

Phoenix: Scorpions & Pirate Tigers teams

Shirley Avenue Elementary School, Reseda

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M01 Mech Robot (Ultra cool)

M01 Mech Robot

Target Environment of robot	Locomotion Method
Indoors	2 Legs
Sensors / Input Devices	Actuators / Output Devices
joystick	windshield wiper motors (2)
Control Method	Power Source
Operated by passenger	Battery
CPU Type	Operating System
N/A	N/A
Programming Lanuage	Weight
N/A	N/A
Time to build the robot	Cost to build the robot
3 months	$1000
Robot`s URL for more information
http://basicrobotics.net/mech.html
Comments
About 3 months ago there was an article on hacked gadgets about a mech that I built. Unfortunately that mech didn`t work very well and before I knew it there were pictures all over the internet, so I decide to rebuild it and this what I came out with, the M01. I wanted to build a robot that is able to carry a person and be as low cost as possible. It consists of 100 feet of metal, 300 nuts and bolts, 2 windshield motors, 10 door hinges, one joystick and a boat seat all this cost me $1000 that includes the microcontroller and the pneumatics system from the first version that I didn?t end up using. Also it has 2 12V batteries that can run for like 4 hours, before you have to recharge them again. Of course it still needs some work on it to make it walk a lot faster, but I'm still working on it

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