WSU Students Making Strides With Robotics ‘Henry’ Placed Second In Colorado Competition

In the battle of man and machine being waged by Washington State University’s Robotics Club, the machine is ahead on points.

At last count, club members injured Henry VIII, their 300-pound robot, four times. Henry has lashed back 15 times, inflicting on its masters a range of sheet metal cuts, gear pinches and a nasty lathe wound.

It’s only fitting that he be named after the 16th-century English king who so deftly parted his wives’ heads from their necks.

But it would be giving Henry too much credit to say he means harm. Robots are being built for space travel and one researcher is developing a machine with primitive instincts and reactions, but don’t expect college robot-builders to program a machine with an emotion as sophisticated as malice.

This baby was built for speed. That proved to be challenging enough, showing the students just how hard it can be to put one foot in front of the other, robotically.

“There was definitely blood, definitely sweat and a couple of tears,” said Scott Crawford, a junior from Olympia and the club’s general manager.

“The closer you can emulate an actual animal or person, the more efficient you’re going to be,” said Paul Dailey, a sophomore from Richland. “However, the human body is unusually complicated.”

When club members set out to enter last April’s Walking Machine Decathlon in Fort Collins, Colo., they planned to build two machines, one of which would be done in November. They built one - Henry - and ended up working right up to race time.

Their first challenge was to build something like a leg and a foot that could push backward. A simple foot on a turning wheel would only be on the ground for a brief part of its cycle, so the engineers designed a leg that would extend, put down a foot, then hold that foot down as long as possible while pushing off.

Josh Myers, an electrical engineering major from Richland, took on the task and devised a “decoupled compound yoke design” so complicated he needed $250 worth of Legos to demonstrate how it works.

“It’s probably something you wouldn’t want to explain in an article,” said club member Jim Boer, “because it took us months with models and drawings to come up with a concept.”

The students then cut out eight legs from aluminum plate with a computerized, water-powered cutting machine.

“The design is basically a walking tank,” said Boer.

Indeed, the robot turns like a tank or Caterpillar tractor, with the legs on one side running faster while the other side drags. Toward that end, the team put strips of flannel over the robot’s hydraulic tubing feet for better skidding on the Colorado State University ballroom floor.

When it finally ran, the reaction was right out of “Frankenstein.”

“It’s alive!” said Dailey.

“‘Get out of the way!”’ recalled Crawford.

The judging formula at the Colorado decathlon gave twice as many points to autonomous, “thinking” robots. But the WSU team was gambling that Henry could win on speed and brute force alone.

It almost did.

Overall, Henry placed second after winning the straight-line dash, a circular walking tour, a cone-seeking event and a dash in a boulder field. It did the 9-meter dash in 18.2 seconds. That’s nearly twice as fast as its closest competitor and 30 times faster than Carnegie Mellon University’s $1.7 million Dante II, which NASA tapped last year to crawl around the crater of an active Alaskan volcano.

And Henry cost only $5,000.

“We just had this dumb beast that zipped by and beat everybody,” said Boer.

The Discovery television channel is slated to feature the decathlon in a Nov. 14 episode of “World of Wonder.”

This year, the club is shooting even higher, “reaching up the animal hierarchy,” as Boer puts it, to build something that is less walking machine and more actual robot. It will have six legs, like an insect, with each leg empowered with independent three-dimensional motion dictated by microprocessors tied to an on-board computer.

The club’s list of active projects also includes a robotic opponent for use in laser games and a submersible robot for the scuba club. With a flier that says “Build Your Own Toys,” the club is looking to boost its 25-member roster in a Tuesday meeting at 7 p.m. in Todd Auditorium. Then there’s the naming of the next robot, but there’s no rushing that, said Boer. After all, it takes time for a robot’s personality to emerge.

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