This week’s Joy Beat celebrates the joy of young people building and succeeding together. Students from Brockton High School’s Aerospace and Robotics Competition team, Quadcopter & the Flyers, recently finished first place in a national competition to design, build and fly autonomous and semi-autonomous drones.
Team members Henry Ani and Julian Melendez joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about the joy of creating, the thrill of competing and the confidence they hope to inspire in others. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: So take us back to the day of the competition, and paint the scene a little bit for us, for people who may not know what a robotics and drone competition looks like. What exactly is the competition? What are you doing in your respective roles? Julian, you start off.
Julian Melendez: So, in my respective role, I was a pilot. So, each year we are given different tasks. Henry or I will probably go deeper into it later, but basically, my job was just to mainly focus on trying to operate those tasks as best as I could. So there’s a lot of practice, a lot of waiting on parts until we actually got them and fix them on our drone. Just a lot of practice because my job, if I mess up, then it’s kind of all over our necks. So, right. So mostly just practice.
Arun Rath: There’s a lot that goes into it before that competition day. And, Henry, for the competition, is it like flying a course? Or, how does that work? Like what do people get judged on? And tell us about your role in it.
Henry Ani: So before I start, I just want to give a synopsis on what the competition consists of. It’s like a competition where each year they release new tasks you have to do with your drones. So there’s normally about two missions per competition. And there’s also virtual tasks you do when leading up to the competition that you submit. And when you submit each task, you get certain points that contribute towards your competition score.
So this year, the two missions — mission number one was computer vision-based, so you would use your drone and it was supposed to simulate a search and rescue, so saving a drowning swimmer. So, they had two inflatable pools and different color baskets inside of each pool, one red and one blue. And your goal was trying to use the computer — or, well, your drone and a camera — to recognize which one was red and then save the red one. And if you saved the blue one too, then you got extra points, but that was only for nationals. And then mission number two was kind of a hodgepodge of many different things. One of them was saving turtles, so like simulate saving turtles. So there’s stuffed turtles on the ground, use your drone, pick it up, and you place those turtles inside one of the inflatable pools as a safe space. And then the other part was whale tracking. So you get hockey pucks on the ground, you pick them up with your drone, and then drop them on certain things using your camera to simulate tracking a whale.
And my role in everything was, I guess, like ground control, the electronics, programming part. Then also, I had to take a leadership role this year for the team because I’ve kind of been here for a while and like everybody kind of left. So me and Julian were the only like veterans left. So, we kind of had to like not only like help lead our team, like help like the new members on our team learn, but then also help like the other teams that were part of our school and the middle school team.
Arun Rath: Wow. And so, and Julian, you’ve just graduated and Henry, you’re a rising senior?
Henry Ani: Yeah.
Arun Rath: Wow. So that is amazing and really complicated as well. I got to think, as far as a coding challenge goes, how much does a time breakup between mechanical engineering and coding? Because it seems like a lot to do on both ends.
Henry Ani: That’s mainly for the mechanism ... If you’ve seen a picture of the drone, for lack for a better term, the claw or whatever you use to pick up the turtles, drop the baskets, etc. — that’s the mainly mechanical part. The other parts of the drone are mainly just following instructions, like screwing it in, maybe assembling the frame. But then like the electrical side, really when it comes to like plugging in everything, soldering everything, getting the wiring right. And then the programming aspect would be like when everything’s settled, you plug your drone in and like the Gat Mission Planner, like the ground control software setup in your drone, as well as like setting up your Raspberry Pi, which is a single board computer.
Arun Rath: Just a circuit board.
Henry Ani: Yeah, circuit board. But like that, that job was to connect to our drone and get camera footage so we can like stream it back to my computer. But those are like the three main aspects of like the competition.
Arun Rath: Super impressive. I want to hear about you both got interested. Julian, how did you get interested in all of this?
Julian Melendez: Ever since I was a child, I always liked messing around with stuff and just building things in general. So, I mean, it was just during the summer, I was about to go into my freshman year. One day my mother just said, “Hey, you want to go to this program that’s going on at Brockton High?” I’m like, “Oh yeah, sure. I’m not doing anything anyway.” So, I go and then that’s where I meet Henry, Mr. T, and meet a lot of our, you know, older members that are no longer here with us. And that’s how I got into it.
Henry Ani: When you said no longer here with us, makes it sound like they died.
Julian Melendez: Okay, they didn’t die.
Henry Ani: Just say they graduated.
Julian Melendez: They graduated. I didn’t mean it like, bro. Context clues.
Henry Ani: When you say no longer with us, that’s normally what it means.
Arun Rath: They passed on to college.
Julian Melendez: They passed on to college, exactly. But I stayed there, freshman year, very, very slow, didn’t do too much. For the drone competition. That’s when I really got into it in my sophomore year.
Arun Rath: And Henry, you’ve just finished your junior year, but you’ve been doing this for a while. How far back does this go for you?
Henry Ani: Drones, specifically since eighth grade.
Arun Rath: Wow. And what got you into drones? Was it just something you wanted to know more about from the second that you heard about them, or tell us about it?
Henry Ani: I was already part of the organization Empower Yourself and then like Mr. [Cedric] Turner, he offered me to like start, like go on the high school drone team when I was in eighth grade.
Arun Rath: Who’s Mr. Turner?
Henry Ani: Mr. Turner is like the founder of Empower Yourself. So he like offered me to join one of the drone teams when I was in middle school and I was just like, sure, sounded cool. So that’s when I started.
Arun Rath: What’s the most joyful part about this? You clearly just enjoy this even though it’s super challenging, complicated stuff.
Henry Ani: The most joyful part, I say is when you walk in on competition day, because we’re all given the same problem, the same challenges that we have to design, build, and think about. And the most joyful part, I say, is not only seeing like your finished product, but when you walk in competition day, see like the way everybody else went about trying to solve the same problem. Like you just see like the way like everybody thinks differently.
Arun Rath: Julian, what about you? Where do you find your joy?
Julian Melendez: I would say kind of an amalgam of how Henry sees it, and I would say actually seeing your drone work for the first time. I think that’s a very joyful experience, getting able to fly it, feel it around, kind of see what it can really do. I think that’s a very joyful experience. And I agree full-heartedly with Henry, seeing how everyone else thinks and goes around about the tasks that you are all given. I think it’s a very interesting thing and I think it’s very fun to see.
Arun Rath: What would you want to say to other kids from Brockton who think that they can’t compete with bigger schools or schools with more money?
Henry Ani: I’d say at the end of the day, they’ve done a lot to help level the playing field, the people that run the competition, because especially the first national competition, some, we came in with our regular budget, like nothing crazy. And then some other teams came in and they said they had a $200,000 budget. People saw the competition, I guess they saw that or they heard it. The year after that, they introduced budget limits, so there’s only a certain amount of money you can spend on some parts. Also made it so I can’t use any fancy sensors that give an advantage. But I guess there’s still a little bit of a disadvantage because some schools have even non-economic resources. Maybe they do it as part of school, maybe another engineering class they’d have. But even then, it’s at the end of the day about what you can do with what you have. Because you can have all the resources in the world, but if you can’t think to use them properly, you’re not going to be able to be good with it.
Julian Melendez: I was going to say something very similar along the lines of what Henry said. I believe that if you really put your mind to something and you have the knowledge to articulate with the things that you have already, I think that you can really do anything. You can be amazing. You could really just get out and do what you set out to do as long as you stay along that line that you’ve made for yourself.
Henry Ani: It was definitely challenging and all, but we couldn’t have definitely done it without, help from GreenSight, for example. In previous years, they helped us a lot with ... going about designing our mechanisms, some challenges. Also, on top of that, they helped us a lot with, this year, like, 3D printing some parts. So we definitely couldn’t have done it without them. Also, on top of that, I’d like to thank two of our drone mentors, Johnny [Worthy] and Donato [Kava]. They helped us a lot out, not just this year, but ever since our organization started doing drones, they’ve been helping us, so I’d also like to thank them.
Arun Rath: You guys are awesome. Like, I mean, the gratitude, crediting your mentors, credit to you for crediting your mentors.
Henry Ani: We truly couldn’t do it without them. If they weren’t there, I don’t think we would have gotten as far as we would be today.
