Hilo team headed to NASA competition

The University of Hawaii at Hilo’s team roster for the sixth annual NASA robotic space mining competition is a mix in just about every way.

Five men, five women. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors. Geologists, astrophysicists, programmers. Future engineers.

For robotics, you need a little bit of everything, especially if you’re trying to break new ground.

The NASA competition takes place at the end of this month at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Teams design and program a mining robot capable of autonomous movement.

The robot also must be able to scoop up regolith, a substance that is essentially “space dirt,” in the words of project leader Ethan Paguirigan, a UH-Hilo sophomore. Regolith is found in environments like the Moon and Mars.

“The loose regolith — you can actually extract water and oxygen from it,” natural sciences instructor John Hamilton said. “The key for offworld living is not to take it with you, but to make it there.” Hamilton has been a judge for the NASA contest for three years.

An open call for the competition is announced in August, and this year, nearly 50 collegiate teams are participating. UH-Hilo is the only Hawaii team (last year, Kapiolani Community College on Oahu competed).

But though they prepare for the competition fully intending to do well there, there is more at stake for the students than the Award of Excellence trophy and scholarship prizes offered by NASA. The UH-Hilo team — Team Vulcan — hopes their effort will be the foundation of something bigger.

“This is the future of the university’s robotics program,” senior Derek Hand said. “Hopefully our success will ensure that future students will be able to participate in robotics.”

“Statewide, there is high school robotics all over,” Hamilton said. “And [in] middle school, and elementary. But when you get to the college level, it drops off, and all of the students go away to college on the mainland.” Developing a program at UH-Hilo could stem the “brain drain,” he said.

“The old, ‘Build it and they will come,’” Hamilton continued. Eventually, he hopes to have enough Hawaii teams participating that a state playoff would be needed to see who would compete in the NASA contest.

For now, there is only one.

“Everything’s from scratch,” Paguirigan said. “We have to come up with a design, we have to look for parts, we have to place orders for those parts, and it all came together kind of slow.”

But it is coming together. Donations, including the lightweight extruded aluminum that forms the robot’s frame, came in from faculty advisers. The team found scrap parts to use, like the motor from a junked wheelchair. Hamilton reached out to Boeing, which sent a care package of supplies. He also donated a set of “wegs” — five-petaled metal units that allow for greater maneuverability than either wheels or legs would — that was given to him by a Hungarian robotics team.

Hawaii Community College instructor and team mentor Malcolm Chun welded new plates to the wegs to make them more stable.

“Those parts you’re not able to get off the shelves,” Chun said, estimating he spent about 20 hours on the endeavor.

“When you go to build something like this, you can’t just build it and walk away,” Hand said. “You build it, you take it apart. You build it, you take it apart. And each time it gets better and better.”

The student government provided more than $2,100 to help with the purchase of electronics and the four main motors. It also offered two travel awards to help team members get to Florida.

“It’s very much a community-oriented program,” Hand said. “We couldn’t do this without the help and support of others.”

Hand’s sister Carli, a sophomore in the pre-engineering program, spent the past semester working with freshman computer science major Daryl Albano to make the motors to accelerate and decelerate properly.

“He has the brains for the code, and I’m the future engineer that’s going to be wiring it all,” she said. “We’ve worked a lot together to try to get the motors running together at the same speed.” There are five motors to coordinate: four for the wegs and one for the scooper.

Albano hadn’t worked with Ardunio, the open-source coding program used by the team, before.

“I was learning basics while learning how to code for the motors working,” he said. “It was a huge challenge; it was something new, but at the same time, I liked it.”

A small Raspberry Pi computer, no bigger than a credit card, lets the team control the robot from a distance. It can’t be maneuvered externally, like a remote-control car would be. Instead, it’s maneuvered through its own “eye” (a tiny camera). The team sees only what the robot sees and directs it from there.

The students will be competing against schools that have full four-year engineering programs (UH-Hilo’s pre-engineering program is a two-year one). Some colleges use the NASA contest as a capstone project for senior engineers.

Still, Hamilton said the playing field is a level one, recalling that last year an Alaska team used the transmission from a Barbie remote-controlled car in their robot and did well.

“It was innovative thinking,” he said. “It’s that creative design element that college students are known for.”

After the NASA competition comes a contest sponsored by the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (Hamilton is also a logistics manager with the center). The July contest, called PRISM, builds upon NASA’s program and will allow the Hilo team to test its robot against international contenders, and much closer to home.

The PRISM competition takes place on Mauna Kea, where NASA itself has conducted a number of space-related tests because the mountain’s surface is geochemically the same as that of Mars.

During PRISM, the control room is in Hilo, while the robot is on Mauna Kea, “like a real space mission,” Hamilton said.

The Hilo team is automatically invited to PRISM because it is the home team, but right now Florida is the first priority.

“We’re also excited just about the experience of going there,” Carli Hand said.

Win or lose, she said, the team gets access to resources and professionals who can help with their ultimate aim of growing the school’s program — and offer advice to make future robots better.

“Every year it (the competition) gets harder and harder,” Hamilton said.

One of the easier tasks the squad faced was naming its robot creation. With a team name like Vulcan, there was only one real option — Spock.

Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.