Buffalo Grove Students Build Battling Robots

Twenty-five students are spending one classroom period a day and untold after-school hours building from scratch four robots designed not to help out in daily tasks around the house, but to disable and otherwise mame other robots.

Under the direction of robotics and engineering teacher and division head Randy Hoff, the students are in the final stages of engineering, welding, soldering, grinding and assembling combat robots they hope will bring them victory in the High School Combat Robotics Competition next month at .

Robtics team members — students in Hoff’s robotics classes at Buffalo Groves — learn the principles of engineering and design along the way, but combat robotics is serious stuff.

“Combat robotics is designed to try and disable (other robots). It's kind of like a boxing match,” Hoff said. “And if they can’t disable or knock them out of the arena, they try and get as many hits or acts of aggression on them as they can, like in a boxing match.”

Robots are operated via remote control by students stationed outside the arena.

Each match, staged head to head in an arena surrounded by short walls similar to a small ice hockey rink, runs three minutes and is conducted in a double-elimination format. Judges score each match, unless there’s a knockout, in which case, like boxing, the match ends.

The lure of competition, plus the chance to do some hands-on building and designing with high tech gear, drew these young engineers to the program, they said.

Ryan Vazquez signed up for the robotics class as a freshman, unsure of what to expect.

“I signed up for the course thinking I could gain minimal understanding of just handy skills,” he said. “What opened up was much more. In the progressing years I found myself building more advanced battling robots.

“Who wouldn't want to embrace the display of carnage in exciting battlebot matches?” he said.

What appeals to him most is the hands-on aspect of the program.

“All other classes are just sit in the chair and copy notes,” he said.

”Our class allows us to craft an entire robot thought together and then create the efforts of an entire team. We aren't staring at a board all day.”

He also enjoys the atmosphere of the competition.

“(That’s) where all the hard work through the year pays off,” he said, “and we can compete against one another to see which bot reigns supreme.”

Buffalo Grove will enter four robots in the competition, Hoff said. All weigh less than 85 pounds, are built low to the ground and operate with a 24-volt electric motor.

Most importantly, he said, each was designed from top to bottom by the students, who learn a sophisticated computer-aided design program; the design and construction process takes the entire school year.

“It’s a climax to what they’ve been doing since the beginning of the year,” he said.

“They learn full cad operating modeling softewear. They develop, design, fabricate all the parts. Starting out with raw sheets of aluminum. Nothing is prepackaged,” he said. “Not a thing.”

It’s the design and building process that senior Ian Johnson likes most.

“I really enjoy the challenge of it, there is a moment at the beginning of the class were absolutely anything is possible, you just get an idea and run with it,” he said.

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