Around Town: For the Girls of Steel, building robots is just the beginning
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The two dozen high school girls who became the Girls of Steel hailed from across the region, but more than half came from The Ellis School, just a long robot's stroll from Carnegie Mellon University.
An organization known as FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was sponsoring build-a-better-robot competitions, and a CMU professor sought future engineers among the "great undertapped pool of talent" that is the female half of the population.
George Kantor, systems scientist at the Field Robotics Center at CMU, mentored the group that needed to have a robot built and bagged by midnight Feb. 22.
The Girls of Steel made it with time to spare, Mr. Kantor said.
"I think we had it bagged up at 11:58 p.m.," he deadpanned.
Jaden Barney, 16, a cyber school student in Peters, captained the team. She recalled not knowing anyone at that first meeting, but soon enough the team meshed.
The Girls of Steel won the Rookie All Star Award at a regional competition at the Petersen Events Center in early March, and duplicated the feat later that month at a regional event in Washington, D.C.
They had to make a mini-robot that could pick inner tubes off the floor and put them on pegs that were three and six feet off the floor. So their strategy was to keep the robot as simple as a robot could be.
"We really finessed it so it would work without a lot of parts that break," Jaden said.
They'd build two robots, a mini-bot that they called Squirt and big one named Crush. At the competitions, Crush would pick up the tubes and, with 10 seconds to go, send Squirt up a 10-foot pole.
Their success in Pittsburgh and D.C. propelled them to the championships in St. Louis at the end of April, where they finished in the middle of the field. Mr. Kantor was happy with their showing and happier still that the Girls of Steel kept making the robots better.
"They learned this stuff was not out of their reach," he said.
He hopes to have 50 students on the team next year, and he expects a core of 10 to 15 who come to every meeting and put in about 20 hours a week.
A high point came in April, when the team had a video conference with NASA astronaut Cady Coleman while she orbited the Earth on the International Space Station.
First Published May 17, 2011 12:00 am
