I'm regretting that I didn't bring my own camera, because I had some special guests on my TV show filming yesterday: members of the Uberbots (uberbots.org/2008/) – the ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Avon High School team that annually competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition.

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FIRST (Finding Inspiration and Recognition of Science & Technology… gosh, how likely is it that the name was chosen cause of the acronym?) has over 100,000 high schoolers participate every year (plus more middle schoolers in the partner FIRST LEGO League). The deal is this: the teams get a challenge from FIRST (arriving on 1/3/09 this year) where they are given the rules of the contest. They have to build a working robot, and are told parameters (ie weight/size limits, equipment it must/can't use, what the 'bot is expected to do), and they have 6 weeks to design and build the thing. Then it's on to the regional competition, where each robot makes its run, scoring points for varios functions it performs in 2.5 minutes. Designing the robot calls for focusing on different aspects of the test, ie do you sacrifice speed for efficiency at some other objective). Winners at the local level go on to the international finals.

Last year, the Uberbots made it to the final 4 at the international level.

They arrived at the TV studio along with the robot that reached the elite level last year: Lightning.

And it heckles b-movies

Weighing in at 108 lbs, the challenge that Lightning had to meet involved lifting a 10 pound, 40" diameter inflatable sphere up over a 6' tall wall. The design the Uberbots came up with was reverse engineered from the human arm, and from the gizmo used to pick up tennis balls on the court. Wires in the two large rings (connected to the red part in the photo above) contract or relax to tighten around the sphere, or loosen to release it. The battery powered robot uses pneumatics to run the aluminum arm, which moves up and down to raise/lower the sphere.

This was a mighty impressive sight on camera. The noise of the pneumatics, combined with the huge sphere being raised to – I'll estimate here – a height of over 8'. Two members of the Uberbots team control the movements by a wireless system, partly by using what are clearly 80's-style video game joysticks. I asked them if any bots use a remote similar to the Wii – you move your hand and the robot moves – but was told that the Wii-mote is too sensitive for such purposes. A little hand twitchiness and your robot would skitter off course.

I asked some of the teams programmers if they use PC or Mac to handle the software end of things, and they answered "PC" in a way that was clearly disdainful of Macs.

FIRST founder Dean Kamen has invented a lot of things (including a lot of medical tech, such as a portable home dialysis machine), but is probably best known as the creator of the Segway. That, as well as a motorized variation on the wheelchair he invented, use elaborate systems to maintain balance. Raising Lightning's huge arm with a 10 pound weight attached clearly alters the robot's center of gravity, and the Uberbots confessed that during their prototyping, the robot had fallen over a couple times.

The best answer came when I asked the teen engineers what was their dream project for robot construction. There was a pause of consideration, then one girl answered: "The Iron Man suit!"

Now that's the kind of forward thinking that America needs!