On December 12th, five teams from the Livingston Robotics Club (LRC) participated in the 2009 New Jersey FIRST LEGO League (FLL) State Championship at Mt. Olive High School. Forty-six teams from nine qualifying tournaments throughout the State came to battle for the right to be the NJ Champion’s Award winner this year. The State Champion will receive an invitation to the FLL World Festival to be held in April, 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia to compete with 84 teams from 35 countries. Five out of seven Livingston Robotics Club FLL teams: Landroids, Alpha Force, Thunderclan, Landrias, and r2d2 were qualified to compete at the State tournament this year. Landroids and Thunderclan won first and second Place Robot Design Awards, respectively, in this State tournament.
All teams spent the morning going through the "Smart Move" research project presentations, robot design interviews, and team work challenges. Before the afternoon opening ceremony, teams were given two chances for light sensor calibration at the competition tables and did some last minute robot fine tuning on the practice tables at the pit area. In the afternoon, every team came to compete for robot performance scores. The competition was held on four pairs of fields in the gymnasium as a sport-like event with parents, students, cheerleaders and other spectators cheering for their teams. Each team had three rounds to achieve the highest score with maximum score of 400.
Landroids, the 2009 US Open Champion’s award winner with five 8th grade members from Livingston, presented their "Deer Avoidance" research project regarding deer and vehicular collision problems in Essex County. Landroids made a short movie clip and a PowerPoint presentation to discuss ways to upgrading the current deer deterrance devices to include a driver warning system by using passive sonar detection. The team conducted half a dozen indoor and field experiments with sound waves, while using LabView to analyze their results. In addition, Landroids also demonstrated their robot design to the judges, showing them the multi-sensor use and precision navigation, plus the intricate and original LEGO construction. However, the Landroids could not duplicate the 400 point practice rounds that they pulled off in front of a large crowd during the actual robot performance rounds. The team earned 300 points and ranked #9 in their robot performance scores.
Landrias presented their "Got Bike?" skit for ways to implement safe biking to Livingston middle and high schools. The team has worked closely with officials in Livingston and Montclair during its research project. This all-girls team of 6th and 8th graders has learned many traffic calming and safe biking strategies, and proposed an interactive Smart Biking town-wide website to plot out the best bike route by inputting the location and in-town designations, tracking peak biker flow, to help the police allocate their resources, and monitor the carbon credit saved by students from each school. The Landrias used a simple robot design but complex ultrasonic wall alignment for navigation. Landrias earned 275 and ranked #16 in the robot performance.
Thunderclan, a first-year team with five 5th and 6th graders from Livingston and Short Hills, presented their "Tribrid" design of a small, green energy vehicle that can be used in local communities and cities. They believe their "Tribrid" will have a positive impact on communities throughout the world. They actively presented their project to the experts and communities including NJIT environment engineer professors, Millburn Township Mayor, Chinese School, and Livingston Library. In their robot design, they had fine tuned their robot with raise-able dual light sensors to go over obstacles since the regional qualifier in November. The team started the robot performance competition with 190 points but received 315 points in their final round, landing them in the 7th place.
Alpha Force, a team with students from Livingston, Kearny, and Rutherford, presented their "Keep Kids Safe" research project on innovative solutions for school crosswalk safety. The team presented many solutions to warn motorists of children crossing a street including sensor devices that are connected to the street signs to display warning messages. The team ranked #13 in robot competition.
R2d2, a group of Livingston 4th graders with all mom coaches, presented their "Walk 4 Green and B Fit" project, proposing a walking school bus concept to reduce congestion around the elementary schools. They earned 280 points and ranked #14 in robot performance.
After the last robot competition match, the winners in each category were announced at the award ceremony. Thuderclan received the 2nd Place Robot Design Award, while Landroids received the first place Robot Design Award, with special recognition as an extremely organized and technical excellent team, and also for their efforts in training for many teams throughout the State. In their 3rd and last FLL season, the Landroids team has passed the torch of being the NJ State Champion and the FLL ambassador for two years in the row to a veteran team, the Atoms Family from Flanders, which will be representing NJ to compete at the World Festival. Meanwhile, NanoGurus, a 4-year FLL veteran team from Parsippany, has earned the 2nd place Champion award and 2nd place robot performance this year. The 1st place Robot Performance Award went to HMS Platinum from Hillsborough which achieved two rounds of perfect 400 points. HMS Platinum team in turned admired Landroids’ precision robot shooter design and the robot’s ability to climb on the bridge, which no other robots in the State had been able to achieved.
Also coinciding with the State Championship is the New Jersey Junior FIRST LEGO League (Jr.FLL) Expo. Jr.FLL is a non-competitive robotics program for student ages six to nine. Students were asked to work on a "Smart Move" project by learning about how people, animals, and things are moved from one place to another. Students need to hunt for answers and create a poster to demonstrate their findings. They also need to use LEGO bricks with an option to use a LEGO robotics kits to build their models to demonstrate their findings. Seven Jr.FLL teams from throughout New Jersey participated in the event. Spongebots, the only Jr.FLL team from Livingston Robotics Club with three kindergarteners and three first graders from Harrison Elementary School, developed a fictional story titled "A Cat and a Computer" about a family that needed to move from another country to New York City. Spongebots built LEGO models and wrote a robotics program to demonstrate a cat, a computer, ships, and an airplane with motors and a sensor to operate propellers. The complexity of their models landed them with the Complexity and Decoration Award.
On December 17, 2009, the Livingston Robotics Club held its end of the season party at the Livingston Hillside Community Center. Teams, coaches and families gathered for an evening of relaxation and celebration. Each team played a video or a photo slide show to showcase its FLL season. All of the members, ranging from kindergarten to 8th grade, played games and ate pizza together. "It has been an amazing FLL season with all teams performing exceeding expectations. Thanks to everyone’s hard work and dedication. There was much focus on the project research and as well as building robots", said Pearl Hwang, President of Livingston Robotics Club.
This has concluded the short but intense NJ FIRST LEGO League Smart Move competition season. Landroids will move on to the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) next year, which is a higher competition division for the high school students. All other FLL teams will take a break until next May to regroup, recruit and prepare for the new challenge, "Body Forward", which will be about biomedical engineering.
For more information, please visit http://www.landroids.org