Teachers report that the team members from the mountain city of Briançon, despite a bus ride that began at 6:00 a.m., were perfecting their robot until minutes before the competition started. Their "Express de 13 heures"—which was very precise, but sluggish, came in a close second.
The technical specifications for the Robots contest were designed by the ITER Organization Remote Handling Section to mimic an ITER-like remote handling task. The successful robots easily performed 90-degree turns and about-faces.
The celebrating high schoolers stand between the first challenge—the mobility test (background)—and the remote handling challenge, where the robots raced against the watch to pick up a maximum number of blanket modules from the Tokamak mockup and deposit them safely in the Hot Cell window (brown box).
In a nice show of solidarity, twenty-eight students from the Lycée Thiers came in support of five of their classmates who had entered a robot in the contest.
The organizing committee had been working since before dawn to set up the contest platform. The second edition of the ITER Robots contest, organized jointly by Agence Iter France and the ITER Organization, was hosted this year by the Lycée des Iscles in Manosque, which specializes in training students "to be creative in the domains of engineering and technology," according to Principal Maryse Luiu. The Lycée des Iscles entered two teams in the high school competition.
ITER Director-General Motojima and "recteur" Bernard Dubreuil (in charge of the Aix-Marseille school district) received a detailed explanation on the robot competing officially for the Lycée des Iscles. In the background is Alain Bécoulet, head of CEA's Research Institute on Magnetic Fusion, IRFM.
Moderator Jean-Pierre Friconneau, from ITER's Remote Handling Section, rolls the dice to kick off the last test of the day: programming the robots within a matter of minutes to respond to a randomly chosen instruction.
Members of the jury Byung Chung Na (ITER), Delphine Keller (IRFM), Bruno Pélissier (Academy Aix-Marseille) and Jean-Baptiste Civet (Academy Aix-Marseille).
From the start, the competition was tight between "l'Express de 13 heures" from the Lycée d'Altitude de Briancon (on the mat) and "Bip-Bip" from the Lycée Thiers in Marseille (in the background).
"What I saw," said a supervisor from Briançon, whose group placed second, "was that a group that was very disparate at the start came together around this year-long project. It motivated them. The students made their own choices in conceiving and programming their robots and we stood back and watched them go down unsuccessful roads before they found the solutions that worked. You have no idea how valuable an experience like that is.
In addition to their science and technology classes, students dedicated lunch breaks and Friday afternoons to conceiving, building and programing their Lego robots.
What could possibly motivate high school students to jump out of bed at 5 a.m., have a quick shower and breakfast, and make a two-hour bus trip to Manosque? The ITER Robot contest!
Helios brings good luck to the team from Sainte Tulle
Not forgetting the goals of the ITER project, the winning team from Sainte Tulle named their robot Tokalios—for Tokamak + Helios, the Greek god of the Sun.
Four of the five junior high teams were eliminated in the first round. One participant, Damien from the College Pesquier in Gardanne, admitted his disappointment but said that, if he could, he'd be ready to start again. "What I liked about the project was the collaboration between the students and the professors and the fact that we met out of class to work together on our robot."
The lighting and surface conditions during the contest were not necessarily the same as those in the home practice areas: many of the teams' robots were unable to get past the mobility test and follow the pre-defined trajectory.
Alessandro Tesini (right), head of the ITER Remote Handling Section that co-sponsored the competition, was "impressed by the quality and the quantity of the students' work."
May 2013
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