A plea for roboticists

[Gui Cavalcanti]

I would like to start by saying that I am shooting for a Mechanical Engineering major, but I consider myself a roboticist at all times.

I officially stopped competing in FIRST the year before last, but I've been keeping up with the competitions. Drawing from the past 5 years of robot history that I've witnessed, I am of the opinion that Dave Lavery will come on stage this year, set down a big cardboard box, and say:

"This year, we've built the robot for you. Rule #1: you may not modify the kit robot. Now, for the next 6 weeks, would you please, please, PLEASE program it?!"

I now recall all of my previous years, and it seems like all I was doing was building big, glorified RC cars with arms poking out of their midsections. I worked in Olin's Intelligent Vehicles Laboratory over this summer as a motion control engineer (read: designed and built stuff that moved), and I honestly spent two months out of the three programming. We, in fact, programmed so much that we ran out of time to build the robot - we're going to finish during the school year.

Meanwhile, in the robotics lab next door, three of my friends were working on a robotic biped named M2 that was built in 1998. The motion control hardware (motor controllers and amplifiers) has been through 3 revisions simply because the robot is so old! After 7 years of programming (4 of which were at MIT), we still can't get it to walk.

Ever since Autonomous mode debuted, FIRST has wanted us to make real robots, the likes of which are active in every university with a systems engineering major. Every year, however, I see a majority of robots either dead for 15 seconds or giving the double "254nownownow!" signal to both sides of their drive train. It took a year of college for me to realize how sad that is, given the massive amounts of tools the kit provides you (a fully tuned PID loop for the most powerful motors in the kit, an IR beacon, pressure transducers, current sensors...).

My faculty advisor at Olin used to be the vice president of engineering at iRobot, and he told me that iRobot's had around 40 job openings go unfilled for the past year or two, simply because of a lack of skilled roboticists. What is a roboticist, you say? A roboticist is the uber-engineer, the systems engineer on steroids. A roboticist can create mechanical designs as effectively as any MechE, that factor in those pesky things like wires, sensors, and effects like EMF. A roboticist is envisioning the control algorithm for their design while the design is still in Inventor or Solidworks. A roboticist selects the appropriate servomotor and control hardware for their design before any solid model is ever touched.

I'll stop rambling on now, and just submit this plea: please, be roboticists! I know it's really hard learning everything at once, which is why many teams default to just working on the mechanical structure of their robots. I promise you though - if you make the extra studying and programming effort early on, if you learn your sensors well, and if you take the time to research PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control loops, higher and lower brain functionalities, and even a little SLAM (simultaneous-localization-and-mapping), your robot will balance on its two rear wheels and thank you at the end of the season. More importantly, if you pick up enough along the way, you can go to any college you want, and any corresponding career.