Re: pic: Why 12 m/s is important.
 

We have built our robot for the last six years in the Light Manufacturing Facility, a collection of machine, wood, and sheet metal shops to which we have had varying amounts of access over our time there. It's adjacent to NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (you know, the big swimming pool) here in Houston. We're very lucky. Hopefully they'll let us come back next year.

Very few of our mentors work at the LMF, so a lot of times we get some strange looks when people show up to work at 6 on President's day, and find us there, bleary-eyed and hallucinating. Most of the people are pretty much used to us by now, though, and we do a pretty good job of cleaning up after we use their machines, so hopefully, we're just a mild annoyance.