Naperville North Huskie Robotics team ready for competition

Sitting in a classroom during winter break, none of the roughly 80 students knew how they would accomplish the task they were presented with that day.

"Every year starts this way," said Arpan Rau, one of the team's veterans. "We learn what the task is at the same time as everyone else, and then it's off to the races.

"Every year the challenge is different, but we always get six weeks to build a robot, from the ground up, which can accomplish the tasks. This year it has to pass and shoot a 2-foot-diameter exercise ball."

Arpan is one of more than 80 Naperville Unit District 203 students who make up FIRST Robotics Team 3061, Huskie Robotics.

After learning the challenge via simulcast, students immediately started brainstorming.

The team's goal is to do better than last year, and that will be difficult. Last year, Huskie Robotics won the Northern Lights Regional in Duluth, Minn., and became eligible to compete at the FIRST Robotics World Championships in St. Louis, Mo.

"For a fifth-year team, that is an amazing accomplishment," said Cari Cesarotti, last year's captain and now a physics and math major at Cornell University. "At the beginning of the season last year, we set our goal as 'Control our own destiny,' meaning we wanted to be able to score and win matches on our own, since sometimes you are paired with nonfunctioning robots during the series of matches."

The team intends to carry valuable lessons learned from last year's championship experience into this season. This year, the team's stated goal is "Be No. 1, Memorably!"

Investment, growth

The team has good reason to expect great things this year, said Geoff Schmit, Naperville North teacher and team co-sponsor.

"We started six years ago as a team of four students. Last year, we were a team of 50 students. This year, the team has over 80 students, with 60 routinely in attendance for build days," he said. "We also have more sponsor and parental support than ever before. They donate time, expertise and money to our efforts. Companies, mentors and parents all see the value in investing in students getting technical experience."

And it's an investment that is paying off. Team 3061 has officially graduated its first three engineers from college into industry, with others on the way. Students still in college already have completed internships with NASA and Elon Musk's Space X Corp. Team members who have moved stay in touch with Team 3061 and join other teams in their new area.

Last year, of the 13 graduating seniors on the team, 10 selected some form of engineering as a major in college.

For some corporate sponsors, the investment has come full-circle as first-year Team 3061 member Sean O'Halloran completed an internship at Navistar, then landed an engineering job with Motorola Solutions. Navistar and Motorola Solutions are two of Huskie Robotics' longest-standing sponsors.

And O'Halloran has become one of the team's engineering mentors. Navistar recently was honored for its efforts by Naperville Unit District 203 at the Education/Business Partnership breakfast.

"This year mentoring the programmers has been easy; they already know everything," said Ian Ren, a mechanical engineer with Navistar who has served as a Team 3061 programming mentor for three years. "I'm just here for support."

Indeed, the students now are able to teach each other skills from year to year. They also are innovating in ways that were unexpected.

Freshman Brandon John, for example, has been printing parts for the robot on the school's 3-D printer.

"It's a great piece of equipment to have access to," he said. "We've been printing things like spacers and sensor brackets for the robot."

Throughout the build season, the team was consistently ahead of last year's robot construction schedule, with the credit going to so many sources.

'Like a small company'

"Without the mentors, none of this would be possible," said Rebecca DiOrio, a teacher at North and team co-sponsor. "We have engineers, machinists, programmers, marketers and more who donate their time and talent to help the students learn amazing skills."

The team's rapid student growth is managed by breaking them into sub-teams responsible for things such as programming, design, electronics, fabrication, media and marketing, and the mentors help them learn future work skills in those areas.

"We have students of all ages who can weld, run milling equipment, and design the entire robot in CAD," she said. "So much of that is due to mentors teaching them. The team runs like a small company."

One side effect of being in robotics is that Team 3061 alumni now are paying it forward as mentors to teams in their college towns and volunteering for robot inspections at regional competitions. Current team members also mentor four younger First Lego League teams in the Western suburbs.

New sponsor GridConnect of Naperville led a team vision session that helped students guide their goals this year and into the future. Create Cut Invent, also a Naperville company, provided hours of water-jet time, cutting vital precision parts from aluminum based on student designs and drawings. New sponsor LexTech consulted on Web app design issues.

The team has worked hard to build a tradition of improving every year. Teacher and team co-sponsor Mark Rowzee sums it up: "None of this is possible without the mountain of community support we've gotten. We're very thankful. No matter the outcome, each of these students has had an amazing experience that they can't get anywhere else at this age. It truly is a sport of the mind, and it's the only sport where everyone can 'turn pro' with the skills they have learned."

You can watch Team 3061 in person Friday and Saturday, April 4 and 5, at the Midwest Regional at UIC Pavilion in Chicago. Live streams of the matches will be available at www.usfirst.org.

To learn more, visit www.team3061.org, email info@team3016.org or follow the team on Twitter at @team3061.