Seneca Valley hosts robotics competition
JACKSON TWP — Potential drone and rover pilots and engineers of the future honed their skills Thursday morning, April 27, at the Sea, Air and Land Challenge, overseen by Penn State University and held at Seneca Valley Senior High School.
Thursday’s event was the culmination in a semester-long challenge for high school students to build and showcase a functional unmanned land, sea or air vehicle. On the day of the challenge, these vehicles take part in missions which have real-world relevance for national defense.
The competition brought 110 robotics students from five different schools across Western Pennsylvania, including Armstrong, Quaker Valley, Pine-Richland, Deer Lakes and Seneca Valley Senior High.
For Seneca Valley robotics students, the challenge serves as a litmus test for all that they have learned throughout the semester.
“That’s what they do in the course ... they design, test and build their robot to participate in this challenge,” said Joe Logsdon, applied engineering and technology teacher. “This is like ‘judgment day.’ It works or it doesn’t work. They put all the time in, so now they have to prove what they can do.”
The “sea” and “land” portions of the competition were held on separate patios just outside the school building, while the “air” portion took place inside the school gymnasium. Regardless, all vehicles had essentially the same objective: to pick up colored blocks and carry them to a designated drop point.
Each of the three challenges comes with a plot to make it relevant to the real-life purposes and applications of national defense. For example, the premise of the “land” event was that a tornado had touched down in an unidentified city, and the students’ newly built unmanned vehicles are needed to deliver supplies to citizens who cannot leave the area.
Seneca Valley students participated only in the “land” portion of the competition, and with three different teams of three students.
One team — consisting of Nick Cook, Evan Weis and Shawn Barker — brought a totally autonomous land rover, the only such machine in the entire competition. They dubbed their masterpiece “wheelz_X.”
“The other teams here ... their robots aren’t necessarily autonomous,” Nick said. “So they’re controlled by someone with a remote or some other form of controlling the bot. We have our bot run automatically. So we’ll hit a button and it’ll go on its own.”
There may have been plenty of reasons why no one else entered an autonomous robot, as Nick and Shawn attest.
“Everything needs to be perfect. All the sensors need to be working accordingly, and all the parts and the components of the robot have to work together,” Nick said.
“There has to be a lot more redundancy ... because everything has to work perfect for it to work because you’re not controlling it,” Shawn added. “It’s controlling itself.”
The other two Seneca Valley squads fielded more conventional entries. The team of Tyler Mercer, Matt Kohler and Nick Flockerzi entered “The Iron Claw.” The third team, named “Clawzilla,” was fielded by Brian Hecht, Ethan Lindberg and Zach Davis.
The nonautonomous course contained numerous small obstacles, such as rocks and plastic flotsam, for rovers to dodge and overcome to complete the objective. There was an added challenge for operators: Pilots were not allowed to look directly at their machine while operating it, instead gathering visual cues from an external monitor as an actual drone or rover pilot would.
For the “land” competition, autonomous and nonautonomous vehicles had their own separate courses. As the only autonomous entry, “wheelz_X” had the course to itself.
“Like Ricky Bobby said, ‘if you’re not first, you’re last,’” Shawn said.
Seneca Valley’s Sea, Air and Land Challenge is just one of 10 such challenges across five different states that Penn State’s Applied Research Labs has planned for 2023. Four others are scheduled or have already taken place across the state of Pennsylvania, along with two in Michigan, one in Ohio, one in Virginia, and another in New York City.
