Nimble design, driving are key to ASU Rossum Rumblers Robotics Club as they head to championship

Arizona State University’s student-led Rossum Rumblers Robotics Club is heading to St. Louis this weekend to compete in the VEX Robotics World Championship.

For the competition, they had to build a robot that goes head-to-head in a 12-by-12 foot field with another team’s robot to collect and short balls and knock them out of the other robot’s clutches.

It’s a high-pressure competition that the students have spent a long time preparing for. The Show talked with Alessandro Marcolini, robotics club president, and lead engineer Enzo Muggler.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so for those of us who know nothing about robotics, let's start at the beginning here with in terms of how this works. So you get sort of a game, a prompt, a challenge, right, for these things. This one has to do with designing a robot to go head to head with another one.

What does it, the competition actually look like?

ALESSANDRO MARCOLINI: Yeah, so I mean typically when you're engineering something, you obviously have constraints. You're thinking, what am I going to build a product for? So the competition kind of mimics that. We come up with a game and it has constraints and rules and we build a robot that plays it.

LAUREN GILGER: What's the game this year?

ENZO MUGGLER: This year, we're picking up these hexagonal balls, they call them blocks, and we're picking them up, storing a bunch of them in our robot and putting them into these tall horizontal goals and just putting as many of these blocks as we can in those goals while competing with the opponents for possession of those goal spaces.

LAUREN GILGER: So you have to kind of ward off the other robot.

ENZO MUGGLER: Exactly, yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: So how do you begin designing a robot to do something like that? Like where does the conceptualization start?

ENZO MUGGLER: So the first thing we do every season is analyze the game manual that the RECF, the parent company, releases about the game. And so we go through and we try to strategize seeing what's most effective and what will score us most out of points in the least amount of time. What can we do to defend against other robots?

And typically there'll be other teams throughout the season that will build robots really early and we'll see what their strategies are and we'll take inspiration and see what they do and what works and what doesn't. And we'll formulate our own robots to sort of compete against theirs.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, that's smart. So you wait and see what the competition looks like.

ENZO MUGGLER: Exactly. Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: The design part, like in the end, do a lot of these teams have similar looking robots? Because there's like one way this works best, or does everybody kind of come up with something that looks pretty different.

ALESSANDRO MARCOLINI: So I'd say it depends year to year. But typically it ends up being a few designs that stand out just because they're easy to build or they're really effective and they can score a lot of points and things like that. And then teams look at that and then copy each other, iterate off each other.

It ends up being pretty similar.

LAUREN GILGER: Pretty similar. What works works. And this is 3D printed parts. There's, like, programming involved here. Describe the technical side of this a little for us.

ENZO MUGGLER: So we do, since we're part of university, the University of X program, we can manufacture our own parts, which isn't a liberty the high school teams have. So we 3D print, we can machine. We can buy materials off the shelf, we can buy blocks of aluminum and machine out of them, which is really cool.

So we get to learn machining practices and real manufacturing stuff. So we do 3D print. We are able to buy our own custom pneumatics. We wire together the robots ourselves. We can make custom PCBs for our robots. It really is just a whole. We go through the entire robot. Everyone on the team has a part in each component, whether that's electrical or mechanical or even strategy.

LAUREN GILGER: Even strategy. Tell me about the strategy part of that. Some of this is driver skills, right? How does that work?

ENZO MUGGLER: So I will say the driver side can be more important than the mechanical side. It's because with a good driver, you can probably outclass a good robot with a bad driver. Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Who's the driver? Which one of you?

ENZO MUGGLER: We have two drivers. I'm one of them. Another one is not here today, but they're really talented as well. So since we have a competition in a few weeks, we've been starting to practice and getting good at driving.

LAUREN GILGER: So what goes into being a good driver?

ENZO MUGGLER: It's a lot of hours of practice. We have a skills challenge, which is where you play with the robot itself on the field. And practicing for that is just going over and over again the same skills route, optimizing, going faster every run, and just trying to get the highest score.

For match play against other teams, since we're a university team, we'll sometimes invite high school teams out to our lab, and we'll have a day where we compete with high school teams to get the practice in for us.

LAUREN GILGER: They probably love that.

ENZO MUGGLER: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: So, I mean, it sounds like teamwork is actually pretty essential to this, but also, I wonder about the testing, the trial and error. Have you had some major failures in the process of doing this?

ALESSANDRO MARCOLINI: We definitely have. We, as a team, we like to be ambitious with our designs, so we like to try some things that are really out there and that no other team tries, and so sometimes that ends up in a lot of failures. So actually, our last semester, we had a completely different design that we ended up scrapping and starting again from scratch.

LAUREN GILGER: Oh, man. Is there a moment in a competition that you both really love, that you're looking forward to, or maybe one that you're stressed out about that you're like, man, this is gonna be a tough one?

ENZO MUGGLER: My favorite part is a combination of the two. It's when something really bad goes wrong, and you have to figure out how to fix it as soon as possible. There's so much adrenaline and so much stress in the moment. It's so fun having to come up with a really quick solution that works well.

LAUREN GILGER: Has that happened to you?

ENZO MUGGLER: Yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell me about it.

ENZO MUGGLER: A good time is like our drivetrain completely spiffing out, which is like, what the robot sits on to maneuver around and just, you know, going back to our pits, running back, taking the robot apart and trying to figure out what's wrong with it for our qualification match in maybe 10 minutes.

LAUREN GILGER: Ten minutes?

ALESSANDRO MARCOLINI: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: So you got to do it right then.

ENZO MUGGLER: Yeah.

LAUREN GILGER: Did you get it done?

ENZO MUGGLER: Yes, of course.

LAUREN GILGER: Of course. All right. So, I mean, robotics is, competition is one thing, but we're seeing robots kind of pop up everywhere right now with AI and all of the technology that's being advanced right now. What do you both envision this looking like? What kind of work do you think you'll be doing in the future?

ENZO MUGGLER: That's really a good question. There's so many. There's a large variation of robotics you can go into. I know here in Arizona, we have a lot of automation. Even on campus, at the Polytechnic campus, we have a whole automation lab where manufacturing engineers and robotic engineers can practice using robotic arms for assembly lines.

So that's one option. Another option can really be a lot of things because we do mechanical and electrical work, so we're able to kind of split into both of those areas. With the program that we're in, we can choose either mechanical or, like, a electrical, like, specification. And, you know, that allows us to kind of specialize in what we want to do.

LAUREN GILGER: That's going to be really cool. All right, that is Enzo Muggler and Alessandro Marcolini with ASU student-led Rossum Rumblers Robotics Club joining us. Thank you both for being here, and good luck.

ENZO MUGGLER: Of course. Thank you.