Fridley High School Robotics Team Is 'Twitchy' to Compete

In March, Twitchy will go to Duluth to hang inner tubes on nine-foot-tall poles.

Twitchy is a robot, the latest creation of the Fridley High School robotics team. Twitchy's sole purpose in life (a robot's life anyway) is to place as many differently shaped inner tubes on those poles (or lower ones) as it can in 135 seconds.

Twitchy will be competing against other Minnesota high school teams to win a place in the national competition in St. Louis, MO, in April—and possibly a share of more than $12 million in college scholarships for its creators.

The competitions are sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a non-profit organization founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, best known as the inventor of the Segway, a human-powered vehicle.

Every year FIRST presents a challenge to the 2,075 high school teams across the country to design, build and program a robot to perform a certain set of tasks, known as "The Game." Each team begins with a basic robot module but can choose from among an unlimited number of approaches to achieve the goal.

“There‘s a million solutions you can come up with. There’s a lot of creativity, a lot of materials you can use, a lot of ways you can set it up," said Scott Rosenquist, a manufacturing design professional and one of the team’s adult mentors. "It’s always interesting to see what other teams come up with.”

Some schools have as many as 40 students on their team. Fridley has only three. Brandon Knight, 16, a junior, is the gamer of the team, so he operates the controller that directs the robot’s movements. This is his third year in the club. “I did all the programming,” Knight said, with obvious pride.

Also on Fridley's team are seniors Kehinde "Kenny" Sodunke and Paulo Nelson.

Andrew Panning, 20, was the first president of the Tiger Robotics team when it began five years ago and is a mentor to the current team. He gives credit to the program for directing him into electrical engineering, which he studies as a junior at the University of Minnesota.

“When we built the robots, the electronics and the controls were the parts I didn’t know quite as much about, so I wanted to study and learn more about it and it became a big interest for me,” Panning said.

About six years ago Dean Kamen was invited to speak at Medtronic headquarters in Fridley, explained Susan Johnson, a software engineer with Medtronic, and one of the team‘s volunteer mentors. “He was invited for another purpose," she said, "but he said if he was going to come, he wanted to pitch FIRST Robotics and try to get Medtronic to fund it.”

Kamen’s pitch was successful, and Medtronic now provides funds for five north-metro high school teams, including Fridley.

Rosenquist said he is grateful for financial and volunteer help from Medtronic—starting with $5,000 for the entrance fee and purchase of a base kit-frame, wheels, motors, battery and electronics, though the company's total financial contribution is greater still. 

Medtronic's help also includes mentoring from Johnson and Micah Johnston, a clinical research specialist at the company.

Strict rules govern the competition. All teams had five-and-a-half weeks of "build time," a period in which the team learns the objectives of the game and designs, builds, programs and tests it robot. The Fridley team boxed up Twitchy and shipped it to Duluth on Feb. 22. The rules allow teams to tweak programming still, but the Tiger team can't test Twitchy until robot and team are reunited in Duluth March 10-12.

That puts the team to the test too but the program prepares them for it. “It’s hands-on learning," said Rosenquist. "They learn how different tools work. They learn fabricating, programming. They learn problem-solving. Even if they don’t go into science or engineering, they learn life-skills."

And getting a robot to put inner tubes on poles does have practical application in real life. "I was showing Kenny how to glue together pieces of PVC pipe," Rosenquist said. "If you ever own a house, odds are you’re going have to do that.”

For more information on the Fridley High School robotics program, contact Dan Roff, activities director, at 763-502-5605.