Students at Chief Sealth High School are hustling to complete the Iron Hawk Robot in order to participate in a regional FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, robotics competition.

This year the Robotics competition will take place in Portland, Ore. This Northwest regional competition, held during the first weekend in March, will consist of 45 high school teams, including fourth year veterans such as Chief Sealth. Winning in Portland would advance the team to the FIRST finals, to be held in Atlanta, Ga., in April, where the top 245 teams in the nation will compete.

This year, new mentor Ron Pankiewicz, stressed the importance of pre-planning and strategizing before building. So, the team spent the first of six weeks experimenting with different things. Including testing different grips such as bath mats versus tire tubing to see with methods seem to work the most efficiently, for this years game Aim High.

The object of Aim High, the game of the competition put on by FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is to score points by shooting Nerf balls through a three-foot hole, eight feet from the floor. Robots are radio controlled and must be able to pick up loose balls from the floor, load them into the launcher, aim and shoot. Aim High is mostly a game of basketball, meaning that the robot must play offensively as well as defensively. Therefore, robots must be quick for scoring as well as blocking purposes. Teams can also choose to have their robots score less points by pushing or rolling loose balls up a ramp into a smaller hole.

The 1 minute, 50 seconds game starts with a 10 second autonomous, or driverless, period where robots using a vision system are able to detect an illuminated target. From there the computerized robot, if capable, should be able to calculate the range and location of the goals. To accomplish this, students have to learn how to write code to program the robot. After the autonomous period, either the red or blue alliance, composed of three teams each, is chosen to play defense for the 30 seconds.

Then the alliances switch roles, offense to defense and defense to offense for yet another 30 seconds. With the remaining time of 40 seconds, both hoops are open for scoring. As you can imagine, this leads to a fast and furious game.

After the first week of considering how the game could be played and strategizing about what design approach would work best, students and mentors at Sealth decided to go with a three-part robot: a chassis, ball feeder and ball launcher.

Starting with a basic set of dimensions the team built the chassis, or frame of the "Ironhawk" robot, with a low base and six wheels, driven by a sprocket and chain system. Although the team stuck with a traditional design they had to make sure the robot was still swift and able to change direction easily.

Next the team figured out how to quickly and efficiently launch the balls into a hole with a diameter of three feet and eight feet from the ground. West Seattle Bowl actually disassembled one of their bowling ball return machines so that mentors could study the ball handling mechanism. The students decided on a structure similar to, yet less complex, than a baseball-pitching machine, so that a ball when fed to the robot ball launcher would shoot out at speeds reaching 35 mph.

The speed later became a problem when students realized that a rule stated speed could only reach 30 mph, so they worked with Seattle Mariner baseball pitching scout Phil Geisler, who volunteered his personal time and the use of his radar gun to clock the Ironhawks speed. It was hard on the students to tone down the Ironhawk to be within legal speed, but they made the sacrifice.

The third and final part was figuring out a way to pick up, store and feed balls to the ball launcher. The team started with a harvester made from two belts made from bike tubes that would be able to pick up balls from the floor. The harvester then drops the balls in to a pan made of Plexiglas where the balls, using an escalator also made of belts, are carried to the launcher of the robot.

Accomplishing all parts of the design and build proved to be a big challenge for the team. Students and mentors were up until 2 a.m. on the night before the robot had to be shipped down to the competition, and the Ironhawk had only had short test runs.

But the ball launcher was a thing of beauty, and the team made their final preparations for the competition confident in the robots ability to dependable hit the target.

But would all the parts work well together and hold up against the defensive play of the other robots? You'll be able to find out next week, when the team reports on their results from Portland.

Margo Femiano is a Chief Sealth student covering the Ironhawk construction and competition and can be reached at wseditor@robinsonnews.com