By Ryan Smith
Meadville Tribune
MEADVILLE —
Five teenagers huddle in front of a big, bright-yellow robotic arm clutching a basketball.
“We’re basically just trying to make the robot shoot hoops,” says 17-year-old Sam Tome, holding a gadget that looks something like an oversized TV remote control. “It’s really a lot of trial and error. We’ve got it picking the ball up pretty good ....”
Jordan Buxton, who at 18 is more experienced with these robots — in fact, he programmed one of them — steps in with some advice: “I’m just sayin’ in this T1 mode, you’re not gonna be able to throw it far enough. It’s not gonna go fast enough. Maybe in auto-mode, though ....”
Whatever the case, Tome says, “we’re gonna try not to break any lights today.”
That’s just a glimpse of what a group of local high-schoolers are up to this week at Precision Manufacturing Institute’s Robotics Summer Camp 2010. The 11 Crawford County teens who pre-registered to attend the free camp have been actively learning about a wide variety of real-world robotics applications, as well as learning about the wealth of educational programs in the region that can prepare students for a career in automation, according to organizers.
“The whole camp’s about career awareness,” said PMI robotics instructor Steve Preston. “It gives students a chance to see what jobs in robotics technology can be.”
Preston said he and other camp organizers do that by teaching the basics using the same industrial robots that are found multi-tasking on manufacturing floors around the country and right here in northwest Pennsylvania.
Buxton, a recent graduate of Saegertown High School who’s participated in the camp each of its past two years and is now assisting the instructors there, said “when I first came here, I didn’t really know anything about robotics.”
But “I learned a lot from the first two camps,” and now, “that’s what I’m going to school for.”
Robots can be programmed to “do basically anything you want them to do,” said Buxton, who programmed one for this week’s camp to use its six-axis arm to create sand art. “I just think it’s really cool how you can have them do whatever,” he said. And “whatever I go to do (professionally), I’m never gonna get bored. That’s what interests me — how far (the field) expands.”
Those real-world applications for robotics have continued to grow in northwestern Pennsylvania in recent years, according to Preston, with equipment being used for welding, manufacturing, painting, assembly, parts handling and a range of other tasks.
“I think the whole nature of staying competitive globally is to automate,” said Preston. And when it comes to the workforce of the next generation, “for people who like to work with their heads and their hands,” he said, “this (field) is the solution.”
Just like the annual RoboBOT robot-building competitions hosted by the northwestern Pennsylvania chapter of the National Tooling and Machining Association, the goal of PMI’s Robotics Summer Camp is to stimulate student interest in technical careers.
Fourteen-year-old Maple-wood High School student Randy Maloney said he decided to get involved in this year’s camp after participating in last year’s RoboBOT events. “We built a bot that had spikes in it,” he said. “We didn’t do that good ‘cause the motors burned out, but it was a lot of fun to help build it.”
After that experience, he said, “I know what I want to do when I get older. And this way, I have a head start.”
