Award-winning WVU robotics team visits Brownsville Area Middle School
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Lisa Kogan, a mechanical engineering masters student at WVU, wheels Cataglyphis the robot down Brownsville Area Middle School’s hallway on its way to the auditorium to give a presentation to seventh and eighth graders about the WVU robotics team’s winning entry into the Mars Sample Return Robot competition.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
The robot Cataglyphis, named after a desert ant, zooms around a grassy area behind the Brownsville Area Middle School as part of a demonstration by West Virginia University graduate students including from left, Lisa Kogan, a third-year masters student in mechanical engineering; Scott Harper, a first-year masters student in aerospace engineering; and Nathan Tehrani, a second-year masters student in aerospace engineering.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Nick Ohi, right, talks a group of middle schoolers about his team’s robot, which is programmed to autonomously find and collect samples on the ground. Ohi is a first-year Ph.D. candidate at WVU and is a member of the WVU Mountaineers team that won $750,000 in the NASA Sample Return Robot competition.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Lisa Kogan, right, answers questions from 7th-graders Aliza McCormick, left, and Kelsey King, center, who asked about the robot’s power source and emergency stop button. King, who is interested in research and technology, says she is considering a career as a scientist or engineer herself.
Kelly Tunney | Herald-Standard
Seventh-grader Quincy Howard, 12, leans past his classmates to try to wave over the robot Cataglyphis as Brownsville middle schoolers watch a demonstration of how the robot would go about finding and collecting samples on the surface of another planet.
Nick Ohi remembers the joy felt by members of West Virginia University’s robotics team when they earned the top prize in a prestigious, multi-year, international competition recently sponsored by NASA.
“It was incredibly exciting,” said Ohi, 24, of Morgantown. “We put so much into it for three years. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done.”
Ohi and three other members of the West Virginia Mountaineers shared their story during a recent visit to Brownsville Area Middle School where they talked about the experience and gave a demonstration of their robot.
Ohi, the son of Don and Jane Ohi, has a personal connection to Brownsville. His mother, the former Jane Swinker, is a Brownsville native and his aunt, Jean Swinker, is the music teacher for Brownsville Area Middle School. Swinker kept her students informed of the team’s progress during the competition and they were happy to hear the team had won.
“You can’t imagine,” Swinker said of her pride in her nephew.
Other team members who visited Brownsville included Nathan Tehrani, 24, of Morgantown, and Scott Harper, 25, of Spencer, West Virginia, who are both in the master’s program for aerospace engineering; and Lisa Kogan, 25, of Toronto, Canada, who is obtaining a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Ohi is a first-year doctoral student in aerospace engineering.
The WVU team won NASA’s Sample Robot Challenge in early September in finals held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, beating out six other teams from the United States and Canada and winning a prize of $750,000. The challenge pertained to using a robot for future NASA missions to Mars.
Throughout the challenge, the team had nine core members and included up to 20 as students graduated or joined the competition. Ohi and Harper have been with the team all three years while Kogan joined in the second year and Tehrani joined in the final year.
Harper, who was in charge of electrical work, said, “People were really dedicated and kept working on it.”
Swinker’s students were anxious to see the robot and pleased when the WVU Mountaineers accepted an invitation to speak at Brownsville, part of an outreach program conducted by these students of Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Sciences.
The middle school’s 425 students in sixth through eighth grades attended the assembly along with some of the high school’s science classes.
“It’s really cool,” said Jenna Fuller, a seventh-grade student from New Salem.
“It’s really impressive,” said Sofia Almendares, a seventh-grade student from Fairbank.
Shawn Clemmer, principal, said, “We’re trying to get kids interested in robotics and we thought this was a good way to see a live demonstration up close and personal.”
Clemmer also noted the district’s pride that the WVU team includes a member with a Brownsville connection.
“The district is very big on community and it’s excellent to see someone do well from the community,” Clemmer said.
Noting he often visits family in Brownsville, Ohi said of the assembly, “It’s great coming here to show the kids and to give back.”
The assembly started in the school auditorium with an introduction of the team and video about the competition and then moved outdoors to a grassy area behind the cafeteria.
Kogan, who handled mechanics, explained the robot weighs less than 65 kilograms and measures 149.5 centimeters. Standing about four and a half feet tall, it is powered by electric lawn mower batteries and has an arm that can extend to pick up and release samples.
The robot, which Ohi valued at $100,000, is silver with black wheels and bears WV decals. The team named it Cataglythis after a species of a desert ant found in Africa that inspired its navigation.
Ohi noted because the robot had to work under Mars conditions, it could not use a GPS, magnetic compassing or any other method that would require air.
The team explained NASA is planning a mission to Mars in 2020 to produce environmental samples. A second mission will pick up the samples from various sites and bring them together, which was the object of the competition won by the WVU team – the Mars Sample Return Robot Challenge. A third mission will bring the samples back to Earth.
The Mars challenge is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program and aimed to “encourage innovation in robotics technologies relevant to space exploration and broader applications that benefit life on Earth,” according to an advisory from the space agency.
Level 1 of the challenge asked robots to return two known samples from unknown locations within 30 minutes without human control or the aid of Earth-based technologies. Forty teams from around the globe competed at this level.
Seven teams qualified for the final round in which robots had two hours to collect as many as 10 samples that varied in size, shape, location and difficulty. Each team competed by itself while the other teams were sequestered so they could not observe.
Being involved in the challenge was time consuming with Ohi saying the team often worked 100 hours a week in the final weeks before the competition was held.
Tehrani, in charge of mapping, said the biggest challenge was the robot had to be autonomous, “weigh options and made its own choices as to where to go.”
Ohi was in charge of the robot control and autonomy software, “the brain of the robot, all of its decisions about where to go, which actions to perform and what order to perform them in.”
After the win, Dennis Andruckyk, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, issued a statement saying, “West Virginia University has shown incredible ingenuity, creativity and team spirit throughout each stage of this challenge. They were committed to advancing this technology, and we are proud to say that they have done it.”
Prize money won by the team is going back to West Virginia University, which funded the project. Ohi explained some funds are going to the mechanical and aerospace engineering department and the computer science and electrical engineering department. Some funds are going to scholarships for robotics. And the majority of the funds will go towards robotic research.
Ohi, who would like to work for NASA someday, said the team is continuing to do outreach with the public, noting, “Hopefully, we can inspire others to be interested in science.”