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Winlock Man's Mars Rover Model Blows Away Competition: 2003 Winlock Graduate and Former College Classmate Prepare for Nationals
WINLOCK, Jun 26, 2009 (The Chronicle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
It moves with tracks hearty enough to travel over hardwood floors or carpet.
Its aluminum frame holds a small motor and plastic box just the right size to carry eight small rocks.
The entire robot is small enough to pack in a large shoebox.
And it's light enough, fast enough and reliable enough that it won a competition among college mechanical engineering students from around the Pacific Northwest in this year's American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Student Design Competition.
Kevin Sykes of Winlock and his partner from Central Washington University were among eight teams who designed and built miniature Mars Rover robots earlier this year.
They blew the rest of the competition away, according to Terry Olin of the Ellensburg college.
The key to their success?
"Light and simplicity," Sykes said. "The more complex, the more weight, and also means the more could go wrong," Sykes said Wednesday at his Winlock home.
Sykes graduated this year and is back home, job hunting, preparing for his September wedding and a trip in November to Orlando, Fla., to compete with the national competition with the robot.
The 2003 graduate of Winlock High School said he and former classmate Matthew Brooks might make some modifications between now and then.
Even with 200 hours of design and construction, the pair made last-minute changes before the regional competition.
In the days before the contest, they added duct tape after one of the rocks broke its little plastic carrier. At the last minute, they realized they hadn't incorporated an on/off switch.
The course involved pieces of 2x4 lumber to be navigated over, and eight rocks which had to be picked up and then finally deposited in a target area, all in a fixed amount of time.
Sykes and Brooks were the only team which anticipated the robots might have to run on carpet, Sykes said. Their sturdy, and more expensive, tracks were enhanced with tiny patches of foam rubber, which gave their robot good traction, Sykes said.
All the rovers had a tendency to flip over, but the pair had an edge.
"We designed it so if that happened, we could flip it back over," he said.
The robot, dubbed Fashion Nugget after a favorite album, was the last one to run the course. Many of the previous entrants' robots didn't even complete the course, Sykes said.
He and Brooks were the last to go.
The crowd erupted in applause as it watched their rover recover from a tip over, partly out of wanting to see at least one success, he said.
"When we flipped it back over on the right side, we got a lot of cheers," he said.
It was a winning run, but the robot can do even better, according to Sykes.
"We can run the entire course in two minutes, on a good day," he said.
A video of the Fashion Nugget's winning travels, along with its specifications, can be found on Sykes' Web site: http://www.cwu.edu/~sykesk/
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Sharyn L. Decker: (360) 807-8235
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