We Need One of These

WE NEED

ONE OF THESE!

Mike Evele & Doug Hepfer

with Jim Vinoski

Copyrights

Copyright © 2025 by Competitive Robotics Press

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, investment, accounting or other professional services. While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional when appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, personal, or other damages.

First edition – January 2025

ISBN 979-8-9878413-0-3 (Paperback)

979-8-9878413-2-7 (eBook)

Foreword

We need one of these!

Those words came from Duane Sheldon, who was Superintendent of Grandville Public Schools in 1998. Grandville is a very good public school in an average midwestern suburb, and those words were Duane’s reaction when visiting one of the early FIRST® Robotics events in Michigan. Those words set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to the development of one of our country’s finest educational robotics programs.

As head coaches of that program, the Grandville RoboDawgs, we’re proud to present here the story of how it came to be. We’re incredibly proud of what the hundreds of people who volunteer with our program each year have accomplished – and the unbelievable impact the program has had on tens of thousands of students. But this book isn’t about bragging or blowing our own horns. We firmly believe that what Duane Sheldon said is true for every community in America. We needed a competitive robotics program, and so does your local school. Competitive robotics makes science and technology tangible for students of all ages. The self-motivation and desire to perform that only comes with competition drives students to accomplish amazing things.

We hope this book will help compel community, school, and business leaders to seek out and support their area’s competitive robotics programs. In telling the RoboDawgs story, we want to share stories from our years of involvement that will encourage and invigorate our fellow coaches, volunteers, and teachers around the country as they work to further develop their own programs. Most of all, we want this story to inspire students and adult leaders in those communities that still don’t have competitive robotics programs to take the leap and get them going.

We hope you enjoy this book as much as we’ve enjoyed the years that have provided the stories we share.

Doug Hepfer and Mike Evele, January 2025

Robots in American Pop Culture

The concept of a robot has been around for a very long time. Talos, a giant bronze man, was first written about by the poets Hesoid and Simonides around 700 B.C. According to the story, Talos was commissioned by Zeus and built by Hephaestus to protect the island of Crete from invaders. Talos circled the island three times every day and threw boulders at approaching enemy ships. The concept of a machine serving mankind was envisioned nearly 3,000 years ago, but we are finally living in the period when these creations of mythology and science fiction are being built in the real world.

Americans, in particular, have been increasingly fascinated by robots over the last hundred years. Arthur Daemmrich, Director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian, wrote:

The United States has been a hotbed of innovation since its founding. From the 18th century to today, waves of immigration have brought people and ideas into close contact. The resulting cross-pollination has produced an American style of innovation unlike others around the world. After World War II, the United States took a global lead in public and private spending on research and development, with the government often also acting as the initial large purchaser for still-experimental inventions in electronics, telecommunications and biomedicine. At the same time, a large middle class emerged that was able to buy—and soon demanded—innovative goods and services. Over this history, a distinctive culture developed, characterized by high tolerance of failures, structural supports for intellectual property, financial backing ranging from venture capital to public stock offerings and a drive for novelty across the visual arts, music, food and technology.

Robots are a key area where society has innovated. They’ve been a part of our world of fiction for well over a century. The Tin Woodman showed up in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. The science fiction short story, I, Robot by Eando Binder was published in 1939, and it inspired Isaac Asimov to begin his more famous series of robot stories that were published as a book under the same name in 1950.

Robots turned up in movies early on, too. Interestingly, escape artist Harry Houdini made the movie with the first appearance of a robot, a 15-installment 1919 silent-movie serial called The Master Mystery. (It’s also interesting to note that the word robot hadn’t even been coined yet at that time. It would appear the next year, created by playwright Josef Capek.) The Tin Man appeared once again, this time in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz in 1939. A robot with a mean streak a mile wide showed up as the visiting alien Klaatu’s sidekick, Gort, in 1951 in The Day the Earth Stood Still. And the wildly popular Robby the Robot made its first appearance in 1958’s The Forbidden Planet. Perhaps the first robot that many older Americans remember is B-9, the robot in Lost in Space. This robot, with bellows-covered arms and legs and a glass bubble for a head, was designed by Robert Kinoshita, the same man who had designed Robby for The Forbidden Planet. To be brutally honest, though, those early robots weren’t much to look at. They were clunky things and looked a lot like trash cans with legs.

The development of real robots was moving slowly, but robots in entertainment kept getting better. In the early 1960s TV cartoon The Jetsons, the title family’s household chores were well taken care of by the humanoid robot Rosie. Then, in the 1970s, we saw a veritable cascade of more advanced cinematic automatons, with that decade featuring the original Star Wars with R2-D2 and C-3PO, along with The Gunslinger and all the other ’bots of Westworld and Future World. The 1980s gave us the title characters of The Terminator and RoboCop, along with Johnny 5 in Short Circuit. From the 1990s on, there are too many movie robots in too many forms even to keep count. There were all the different ones in The Terminator franchise and the Fembots in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

If there was one period which represented the coming of age for robots in popular culture, it was the period from 2004 through 2014. In this period, many modern robot concepts were developed and evolved. iRobot, released in 2004 and starring Will Smith, looked forward to the year 2035 (not that far off) when highly intelligent robots filled public-service roles and evolved to conspire to enslave the human race. The animated picture Robots, released in 2005, depicted a world of sentient robots where a striving young inventor named Rodney (voiced by Ewan McGregor) disrupted an evil plan to make all robots submit to forced upgrades. The next big animated robot movie, WALL-E, came in 2008, right on the heels of Robots. This movie is charming and unique for its lack of dialogue. There are only 17 lines of dialogue in the entirety of this one hour and thirty-eight minute movie. The storyline revolves around the last robot remaining on earth, WALL-E, who spends his days tidying up the planet. One day he spots EVE, a shapely probe sent back to Earth on a scanning mission. WALL-E embarks on his greatest adventure when he follows Eve across the galaxy.

The coming of age for robots in movies continued with Real Steel, released in 2011. It stars Hugh Jackman as Charlie Henton, a prize fighter robbed of a future when towering robots take over the boxing ring. Charlie teams with his estranged son to piece together scrap metal to build a championship fighting robot. Then we have the release of Pacific Rim in 2013, an action film where a washed-up ex-pilot (Charlie Hunnan) saves mankind in its battle with ancient sea creatures.

The following year saw a pair of blockbusters with robots as central characters. Disney released its first animated feature from the Marvel Comics series, Big Hero 6, in 2014. This movie tells the story of a young robotics prodigy who upgrades his late brother’s healthcare-provider robot to defeat the masked villain who was responsible for his brother’s death. This movie was a popular hit, and it won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. One more 2014 movie rounds out this ten-year burst of robot movies – Ex Machina. Starring Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikandee, and Domhall Gleeson, this movie focuses on the evolution of a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence. The Turing test is a central plot element, as a young programmer tries to determine if the humanoid robot is capable of exhibiting intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

In just ten years, these seven movies had thrust robots deeper into popular culture. Featuring big-name stars and Hollywood-size budgets, these movies have expanded our concept of robots and given them a more central role in our future.

Let’s talk about actual robots! In 1994, adults started the first robotics competitions. Marc Thorpe, a designer for Lucasfilm, created the robot combat sport Robot Wars, in which remote-controlled robots fought to disable each other in an arena. Thorpe held four annual events around the U.S. from 1994 to 1997. The concept was picked up for television. The first version of the British television series Robot Wars, featuring both professional and amateur robot operators using remote-controlled robots to fight to the death in a glass-and-steel arena, ran from 1998 to 2004.

Adults continued to compete with robots in the entertainment arena. The reality series BattleBots originated on Comedy Central and ran for five seasons, until 2002. After being mothballed for over a decade, it was picked up by ABC and ran for seven seasons there. It was later picked up for a short run by the Discovery Channel. BattleBots thrilled audiences with three-minute competitions featuring a variety of robots of different shapes and sizes, all remote-controlled, competing to destroy their opponents. This real robot competition evolved to become primarily a Las Vegas show, playing popular robots daily in a scripted show. Think WWE for geeks.

The UK’s Robot Wars television series also made a brief reappearance on the BBC, from 2016 to 2018.

Over the last fifty years, all these robots in the fictional realm made the machines real to most Americans – long before the needed technology caught up and brought them into genuine existence.

The Evolution of Robots and Competitive Robotics

In the real world, meanwhile, robots were also capturing imaginations, but in a very different way. They were mostly built by engineers to perform basic, repetitive tasks in manufacturing settings. Automation in industry began in the 1960s, starting with very simple pick-and-place tasks, but soon began moving on to more advanced jobs such as spot-welding. Industrial robots made their debut as mass-production machines in the 1970s, and really started to take off in the 1980s. They soon proved their capabilities in taking on the most hazardous and difficult jobs in the industrial world. Most of the early such robots were static machines with safety fences and interlocks to protect the people around them. However, there were also automated guided vehicles (AGVs), which first appeared in the 1950s as simple tow trucks that followed wired paths to move things around in warehouses and factories. Eventually, that technology would merge with the more advanced robotics automation and create true autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that perform a variety of tasks.

While none of these machines were a hit in pop culture, they represented a confluence of critical importance: the marrying of all the popular markers from the decades of fictional portrayals of robots with the fast-evolving technology that was finally making real-world robotics possible.

Mike: Doug, when you and I were in high school, competitive robotics couldn’t have happened. The technology wasn’t there and the computing power wasn’t there. Advances in our ability to manufacture components and to create faster processors and computers has allowed our kids to build and compete with robots. Engineering advances have allowed us to deal with small scales so readily. We can work with sizes of things on the order of light wavelengths now. We can build microchips very precisely and cheaply to the point where this technology is available to ordinary people. Now kids can use it to build robots and play these games because the technology has advanced to that degree.

Doug: From my perspective, we’ve moved from robots we saw in movies and on TV to things kids can build because there have been significant developments with regard to the types of parts and processors we could use with students. You mentioned miniaturization. When I went to college, the first computer I worked on filled a room the size of a high school gymnasium. You have said that you remember, when you left high school, there was a room that had some Apple IIe computers in it. Computers were big, bulky, and didn’t have a lot of computing power in today’s terms. If you look at what’s happened with that today, we have microprocessors on our robots which weigh just ounces and have more computing power than anything we just talked about in the past.

Mike: That made a transition possible – from robots that our imaginations created, like the Lost in Space robot – to real robots designed and built by students.

Doug: We had this miniaturization take place, but also we had new technologies. Think about global positioning system (GPS). When we were young, if you wanted to find your way, you needed to find a compass and look for the stars...

Mike: And a good map.

Doug: …and a good map, because without a topographic map and a good compass, you were lost. Today, all of our drones use GPS to navigate. Even some of our land-based robots use GPS to navigate. These robots receive signals from seven or more satellites. They fix a location within a matter of inches. Then the kids can use that technology to create this autonomous unit that will go accomplish something. Look at camera technology. When I was a kid, the Polaroid SX-70 was a big deal. You could push a button and see a picture in just moments. Today, our robots have these Intel cameras with two lenses that use parallax to measure distance. They can track 100 colored blobs in the field of vision of the camera and tell the processor how big they are, where they are located in three dimensions, and help a processor prioritize attacking those game elements based on information from the camera. From push a button and watch it develop while you shake the photo to a camera that actually provides this wealth of data – and it’s a $300 camera. There are so many instances where technology matured, sizes came down, and the cost came down radically.

Mike: There you go. Manufacturing, computing power, and price have all gone in the right direction to make this technology ubiquitous.

Doug: If you look at LEDs, even ten years ago, LEDs were super expensive. Look where they are today. Look what the cost is of any of our robot components. Shoot. We have 3D gyros on our VEX robots that cost less than $100. When we bought the first 3D gyros for our aerial drones ten years ago, those cost more than $1,000 each. There has been such a change in the cost and availability of components. Progress like this has made it possible for robotics to move from a concept, from entertainment, to the real world. This chapter is going to look at how robots developed in the real world and then get into educational competitive robotics.

One of the key endeavors that drove advancements in the technology that supports our robots was space exploration. Continued advancement of technology that put us on the moon almost 60 years ago gave our country other new opportunities to use robots. Space exploration drove incredible advancements in robotics.

In January 2004, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on the surface of Mars. Their twin 90-day missions were to analyze a range of rocks and soils to look for clues to past water activity on the Martian surface. The rovers landed on opposite sides of the planet, both in sites that appeared to have been affected by water activity in the past. They would last far beyond their planned mission durations. Spirit finally concluded its mission in 2010, while Opportunity would last all the way until 2018, when a planet-wide dust storm coated its solar collectors. Opportunity set