Building Robots for Fun

By Melody Liu, INSPIRE Grad, MIT, MA

Hi, my name is Melody! I’m a freshman at MIT, and I hope you guys are having a lovely winter! I’m going to talk specifically about one of the best parts about MIT, the Independent Activities Period (IAP). Every January, students flock back to MIT after winter break, eager to spend time in Cambridge without the full semester’s workload. It’s a unique time when students can explore Boston, hang out with friends, read that book we were too busy to read before, and work on awesome side projects. And how do STEM students relax from schoolwork? By taking fun courses ranging from truffle-making, glass-blowing, bicycle engineering, programming competitions or learning a new language. All in a month!

 I decide to take MASLAB (Mobile Autonomous Systems Lab), a robotics competition where Teams of four people build a robot to pick up balls and throw them over a wall. Sounds cool, right? Having never done anything robotics related, that didn’t seem all that hard. But little did I know…

The first day, after a brief lecture explaining rules and programming strategies, we’re deposited in the lab, along with a box of raw materials, and are told to build a robot by 8 PM. Knowing little about how an arduino works or how we would even wire all the circuits together, I felt as if we’d just been dropped in a swimming pool and asked to teach ourselves to swim. But we buckle down, split up the tasks, pester the Teaching Assistants (TAs) and manage to get a moving robot 20 minutes before the deadline. That sense of learning something in such little time is exhilarating. In the course of a week, we had a working robot that could recognize balls, move towards them and pick them up, though that effort required us to work 10 AM to 8 PM daily.

Though the competition hasn’t ended yet (our final competition is next Friday), I know that I’ve learned so much – the frightening kind of learning that comes from plunging head first into an activity. Though I’ve gotten so much out of this experience, I have to remember that the first few days before the competition started, I was terrified. I didn’t know anything about robotics, I was only a freshman and I asked myself countless times why I didn’t choose to do something that I could actually do, a safe class about astronomy or truffle making or learning Python, where I could go relax each day and cook with friends. If I had let those apprehensive fears get to me, I would likely have dropped out. But instead, I knew I had to learn to get out of my comfort zone, which is, admittedly, one of the scariest things to do. This meant that while other teams zoomed through assembling their robots, I had to get over my fear of asking TAs questions. And while other teams seemed organized and planned, I pored over countless websites and resources, watching how past teams won. Although experience, dedication, and intelligence can go far, I would challenge you to actively go out of your comfort zone. Because, in the end, knowing what you don’t know, asking questions, and being open to new experiences will get you further in life than any other qualifications. If I had stayed with what was safe, I would have had an immensely enjoyable IAP, full of fun experiences and undoubtedly learning a lot. But then, I wouldn’t have found out the pleasure of machining your own robot custom part, the experience of designing things in CAD (model of our robot, below!), or the excitement of watching our robot pick up its first ball. Every moment that we allow ourselves to expand our horizons, we see a bit more of the big picture, letting us put our experiences in perspective.

If you want to follow the competition, here are a few sites.
MASLAB Site, explaining rules: http://maslab.mit.edu/2013/site/index.html
MASLAB Wiki for this year: http://maslab.mit.edu/2013/wiki/Maslab_2013
We’re team 12, and we’re required to keep a journal of what we do each day. Wish us luck!

Discuss this blog here: http://tinyurl.com/bloginspire12