Schenectady

About a dozen Schenectady High School students called the Retrievers proudly showed off their elaborate prototypes for a robot that the group hopes will help them win an international competition in June called the NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge.

Bob Svec, a Navy veteran and team leader, said Schenectady will be the first high school in the country to participate in the competition.

He is handling the program software for the robot. The students, along with Mike Gauthier, their technology teacher, are designing the hardware.

The Retrievers will be among 22 teams from Canada, California, Estonia and Mexico competing for the $1.5 million prize.

Gauthier said Monday that the robot the Retrievers design will have to pick up an item and place it in different containers.

A table in the middle of the room held a metal chassis of the robot that the group started working on in October, Svec said. He said the goal within the next two to three weeks is to have "a rolling chassis ready to be tested." Since the competition, scheduled for June 11 to 14 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, will be held outdoors, the Retrievers are hoping to take the robot outside when the weather warms up.

Fifteen-year-old Ethan Kranick referred to one of the three competing designs in which the robot will have to place the objects as the spinning wheel. He and Ahsanullah "Ace" Sehat, also 15, said this "containment method" is good because it has the fewest number of moving parts.

Then there was the chain model, with 8-inch square boxes attached to a chain similar to one you would see on a bicycle. Vasilios Avramidis, a 10th-grader, said "there is more room for every object and the flaws can be fixed more easily" in the chain model prototype.

A QR code will be on the bottom of each container so that the claw that will deposit the objects in the container will not put more than one in the same box, which the competition does not allow. A QR code is a machine-readable code consisting of an array of black-and-white squares typically used for storing URLs or other information for reading by the camera on a smartphone.

He and the other students said one of the requirements of the competition is that the judges retrieve the objects the robots deposit in the receptacle. Some objects the Schenectady team is considering include a tennis ball, PVC pipe and a S-shaped hook embedded in a candle. The object cannot weigh more than 2.2 pounds.

pnelson@timesunion.com • 518-454-5347 • @apaulnelson