Agawam robotics program prepares students for future careers

Aug. 11, 2022 | Jonathan Gerhardson
jgerhardson@thereminder.com

The Agawam Robotics team appeared at the National Night Out and includes Tim Rua, Austin LeBlanc, Tyler Saraglon, Lucas Fillion, Matthew Edwards and Dean Fleagle
Reminder Publishing photo by Jonathan Gerhardson

AGAWAM – Rosie Robotics, Agawam High School’s competitive robotics team, are aptly proving they have the skills to build and maintain robots of the future.

At a demonstration at National Night Out at School Street Park last week, the team was out in full force, commanding mechanized automatons to lift, aim and hurl volleyball-sized tennis balls at a captivated audience of onlookers.

Since the days of programming VCRs, younger generations have been routinely technologically dominating their elders, and the members of Rosie, all entering the ninth grade in September, are no exception.

“We program in Java. For [our robot] we used a bunch of data points to calibrate where we were, and then judging by the data points [we determined] what we had to change. We will make a certain adjustment based the position of the robot. To hit the target, we can also change the RPM [of the ball flinging motor]. Obviously that sensor can’t read distance, but it can read height. And by looking at the height depending on what height the retro-reflective tape of the target is, we can determine a basic gist of where we are and how far the target is,” said Rosie teammate Tim Rua.

The whole project of building and refining their robot is a multidisciplinary mashup of mechanical, electrical and software engineering. A working knowledge of metric wrenches, Ohms Law and computer vision – a subfield of artificial intelligence – are all required. These are real 14-year-old students tackling problems once reserved for cartoon whiz kids.

They work three hours a day after school for 10 weeks – basically a part time job – all to fling a large tennis ball more accurately than some kids at another school doing the same thing.

Dana Henry, co-founder of the robotics program, said, “The country gets what you celebrate. And we’re not celebrating enough of the engineers and the doctors and the scientists and teachers.”

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