Team Fighting Cardinals 2015

Outreach Project Report

Team Members

Damian Lajara

Adrian Chammorro

Ryan Mew

Matthew Khargie

Lamour Butcher

Faculty Advisor

Daniel Phelps

Daniel Phelps has read and reviewed this paper

Introduction

A student and faculty team from York College, City University of New York will partake in NASA’s annual Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) in May 2015. In fact, this will also be the inaugural involvement for York College, and its students to set foot at the highest stage in the category of science and technology. Besides the idea of being innovative with design, and fabricating a robotic system for excavation purposes in our mining challenge, the team appreciated the opportunity, thus accepted all requirements including participation in public outreach projects. Naturally, outreach presentations are a great way of expressing how one really appreciates and becomes inspired by science, engineering, and information technology. It also conveys some form of pride an individual or team take in their work. Furthermore, team York, aka The Fighting Cardinals , were ready to deliver as well as delighted to articulate the message regarding the importance of science and scientific explorations to an appreciative audience involving a majority of students at the elementary level, along with their parents and teachers. The remainder of participants were a few high school students, and staff at York College. This event took place at the York College Atrium organized as an engineering and science fair to inspire and educate our younger and even older generation.

Outreach Activity Design

In addition to speaking about the robot, The Fighting Cardinals were interactive and engaging with the kids and the adults concerning questions and answers, as well as showcasing our interesting robots such as drones and our YorkBot system for the competition.

The activities gave some insight of how interesting, and fun the robots are especially when the drones were in operation.

The kids brought forward some really interesting questions with respect to our drones and the YorkBot. They were also very receptive to our responses and our interactions with them. The questions asked were very cognitive and actually very interesting.Some of the questions asked were: “How do we control the robot?”, “how fast does it move?”, “where is the brain of the robot?” and even “What do we plan to do with it?” We then took turns answering these questions since some of them were directed towards the hardware team while the others were directed towards the software team. We tried to explain what the York bot does and how we interact with

it in the simplest and most reasonable approach. Our response to the first question was, “we plan to control the robot with a microprocessor called an Arduino, which is really the brain of the robot. Using special commands that we can type into the computer using the arduino language, we can control the movements of the robot and make it go in any direction we want”.

The next question where the kids wanted to know the speed of the robot, caught us all by surprise. We were expecting more questions on the outer appearance of the robot since that is what kids usually pay the most attention to, but we were quite astonished. Our response was illustrated in a way where it can be easily understood yet informative at the same time. We answered with: “The robot can move a little close to three

miles per hour, which taking into consideration the weight of it and all of the material it will be carrying, it’s pretty fast”. The next question was very straightforward. Since we told them about the brain of the robot already and how we use it to move the robot, its very much reasonable as to why they would want to know the actual location of the “brain”. We responded with: “The brain is that little blue board that has little lights flashing on it. This blue board is what we call a microcontroller. We can stack other things on top of it also which is why there are a few boards on top of each other. These other boards have separate names called shields. Using this specific shield called an ethernet shield, which also a little blue board, we can make the robot connect to internet and control the movements through a computer in a separate room. This is how the “magic”, where you see everything working wirelessly together so nicely, works”.

Moreover, in response to the next question regarding our plans with the robot, we explained it as simply as: “Our goal is to build a system for the robot that allows it to collect martian regolith by digging and dumping the soil in a collecting bin”. The challenge is that we have to do it within a time limit of ten minutes. This is what really grabbed everyone’s attention. This is when they figured out that it wasn’t just a toy, but something with a bigger purpose.

We truly believe that we have broaden their knowledge in such a way that it will keep them motivated and inspired by what we, as the older generation, have done on that educational aspect.On the other hand, we did not provide any practical interaction with the YorkBot, due to the fact that it was not 100% complete, therefore the children weren’t able to see its full capability, but we did provide enough information and assurance on how we will complete this project to make it ready in full force for the competition.

Furthermore, we allowed everyone to peek inside the robot and ask as many questions as they could for us to be able to provide detailed descriptions and explanations of what the bot does, how it works, its purpose, and why it deserves to exist. During this experience, the team

was organized with the presentation and demonstrations to effectively reach out to our audience to an acceptable level of understanding. Firstly, the organizer of our group, Daniel Phelps, had set the stage with an introduction, then went on to operating a couple of the drones with his assistant, Charlie, who was in charge of flying the actual drones and making sure to keep it in the air and away from the audiences reach for safety reasons.

Consequently, that turned out a success because all the drones were fully operational, flying them from one end of the atrium to next, as well as responding to a couple of students requests such as; special landing, special tricks and so on… It was truly a great experience for everyone during that phase because everyone seemed to be in ‘awe’ as to what the drones were capable of. Daniel, our Faculty Advisor, got us all excited and pointed us in the right direction for a good start to get into what we also wanted to talk about, which is about our YorkBot and NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition.

Secondly, after the introduction of the team and its members, as well as the demonstrations of the drones, team The Fighting Cardinals went into the second phase of describing what the YorkBot is, and how it applies to the actual competition NASA has presented to us. During our presentation, our team was organized into two (2) groups consisting of a hardware and software team. The hardware team consisted of four (4) people: Adrian Chamorro, Matthew Khargie, Daniel Phelps and Charlie. The software team consisted of three (3) people: Ryan mew, Damian Lajara, Lamour Butcher. Mathew, one of the team members of the hardware team expressed himself in a very simplistic but effective way during the

explanation of how the YorkBot was built, and what it is going to do in the actual NASA Space arena in Florida. He was very specific in terms of the components used to build the robot, and what they were used for, such as; the motors, sensors, actuator controllers, power supply and even the materials used to build the body.

In addition, the presenter endured into the tasks and challenges the robot will face in the arena while competing against other schools. For instance, the digging and dumping of dirt like material, and obstacles the robot will encounter such as rocks that could hinder movement or cause obstruction while controlling the robot through a remote control.

Thirdly, the software team was introduced and accepted with gratitude the opportunity to explain how and why the robot works. The software team was proud to introduce the concept behind controlling the YorkBot, and therefore efficiently transitioned into the details of the basic nature of robotic movement and how it can be compared in a similar way to human motion. An instance of this occurred when the topic switched to an analogous concept explaining how the behavior of the Arduino used inside of the YorkBot was compared to the behavior of the human brain, and how the strategic concept was used to explain most of the components that makeup the YorkBot. The reason why these types of concepts were used really shows how everything is connected through energy, and how everything exists because of ‘energy’.

The entire audience was quite satisfied with the presentation especially the demonstrations and our exhibited displays. The students and older audience seemed really overwhelmed with amazement and admiration in regards to how we portray ourselves and the overall amount of information presented. They all appeared to be inspired by the flying of the drones, and the nice tricks it could perform. The students were very cooperative, and the kids were then more approachable with questions for the entire duration of the science and tech fair. Most of questions were reasonable to answer, while a few were hilariously off tangent.

They were also given the opportunity to touch only the outside body and look inside of the bot. A couple of the students from each group seemed to be contemplating their involvement in such an extracurricular activity. One of them seemed to already start a project on robots because of their valid questioning and reasoning of the purpose the components on the circuit. All of their questions were generally valid, applicable to the subject, and simple. As a result, the

team responded with that logic. That gave them insight and a better understanding of the message the team is trying to bring across.

There were an estimated count of 100 people who attended the fair. The majority of the targeted audience, which consisted mainly of K­12 (elementary) students, estimated to be around 60. These students were split up into groups of four consisting of about eighteen (18) per group from different schools, while the minority consisted of a more mature audience; high school level and up as previously mentioned.

Future Outreach Plans

We gracefully accept the challenge to reach out to other schools and science programs in the near future. Prospective targets are the Queens High School of the Sciences, the Summer Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace Academy, and the NASA­sponsored program at York College, otherwise known as the SEMAA Program. In additionally, we would also like to invite prospective students to join the club and be a part of something spectacular. So in spite of that we would definitely have demos demonstrating what the robotics club is all about, thus having a York NASA Fighting Cardinals open house recruitment.

One of our main goals is qualifying, followed by being an optimistic contender in the knockout/quarterfinal stage and further. In the event of this happening, the team is reaching out to all students especially those of the science department to join us and expand our team, henceforth strengthening our capabilities to even go further and be more successful for the following years to come in this competition or affiliated programs NASA has to offer. We are still very new to this community, as compared to top engineering schools like MIT, who have been doing this for years with a vast amount of resources and man­power. There are many improvements we would like to make to this bot in the upcoming future such as making it autonomous, improving it’s speed (since our system heavily revolves around speed and efficiency), upgrading the amount of regolith it can carry at once, optimizing the dig­and­dump system, and even reconstructing the custom wireless interface to easily incorporate all of these features. The future looks very bright for the YorkBot, since as the more time that passes by, the more people with similar interests will join, thus creating a larger network, capability for more resources, as well as keeping everything organized for proper maintenance since we will be able to divide the jobs into proper groups and follow the agile­development methodology.

Therefore, we would like to say it is a tremendous journey in progress and being a part of this program, as well as having the confidence to express ‘the will of fire’ inside of us as a The Fighting Cardinals that sticks together until the end of the journey, is really something we are very proud of. Our motto is to build with our hands, and sculpt with our heads! Otherwise, stone would never see its uniqueness.