Reprinted with permission from the Waconia Patriot
By Al Lohman
The challenge has been issued and another high school robotics season has begun.
Some 220 FIRST Robotics teams across Minnesota – more than there are high school hockey teams in the state – are set to compete. The Waconia RoboCats are one of them.
Now in their ninth year, the RoboCats have begun to prepare their robot for this year’s competition. The 2020 challenge was revealed Jan. 4, and the team has just a few weeks to design and build a “bot” to complete the challenge outlined to all competitors. Under strict guidelines, teams of students are challenged to build and program industrial-size robots to play a difficult field game against like-minded competitors.
The RoboCats first regional contest is Feb. 26-29 in Grand Forks, N.D. One month later they will be at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities for their second competition. There are five contests for schools to choose to compete across the region this season, with the winners advancing to the “world” games. The last time the RoboCats were in worlds was 2017.
A lot has changed since then.
There’s a whole new generation of Robocats – 27 members, many of them first- and second-year freshmen and sophomores after last year’s heavily senior team graduated, according to Robocats coach Peter Potter, elementary school art instructor.
The team also has a new home, some new machinery coming and plenty of new parts to build their robot following a donation last fall of an outdated pharmaceutical dispensing device donated from Ridgeview Hospital.
Their new home is in what once was the old metal shop at the middle school. The new location is much larger than the one room the RoboCats previously had at Laketown Elementary, providing more space for building, equipment loading and the ability to conduct field drills prior to competition. The team was starting to design and build protypes and mock-ups last week.
“It’s so nice to have an entire workshop to ourselves,” said RoboCat team captain Ryan Busch, a junior.
The new space also will accommodate a new 12,000-pound computer-guided machining device the team is getting to design and cut components.
Meanwhile, the team is benefitting from a bunch of parts that it got from Ridgeview Hospital.
Ridgeview has used a robot in its Pharmacy Department for more than 15 years to manage and distribute medications, according to hospital officials. With technology and automation changes in the industry, the current model would no longer be supported in 2020 and was decommissioned.
There was no market for spare parts, so Ridgeview leaders contacted the Waconia High School robotics team to ask if the team wanted it for parts.
The RoboCats said yes and students eagerly dismantled the device.
“We pulled out lots of parts we can put to use,” RoboCat Busch said. Among them: solenoids, pneumatic tubing, metal and plastic components.
“It was exciting to see their vision as students were disassembling the device,” said assistant coach Kim Harper. “Some were saying I can see this part doing this or this part doing that.”
Like Potter, Harper also is an art instructor by day.
How is it that two art instructors are leading what is largely considered a science and engineering endeavor?
Well, there the vision and creativity element for one, Harper notes. Then there’s the planning and progression, Potter adds – much like an art project, working out an idea and bringing it from concept to reality.
That’s what the RoboCats team from Waconia be doing in the coming weeks.