By Dean Tan ’18, News Editor

The Newark Academy Panasonic Team, a group of dedicated robotics experts and aspiring engineers, is in its fourth year of competition in Panasonic Creative Design Challenge. Throughout the winter, the Panasonic Team tirelessly designs, builds, and tests a robot to prepare for competition against other schools in the spring. The Panasonic Challenge tests a team’s creativity and technical skill in computer programming, electrical engineering, and carpentry.

The Panasonic Creative Design Challenge was created in 1991 by the Panasonic Corporation and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), with the goal of inspiring creative high school students to showcase their engineering talents. In the competition, students are given an obstacle course designed by NJIT students and are required to create a robotic device that can maneuver it as well as complete certain tasks. In addition to constructing a robot, the team must also keep a detailed engineering logbook, produce a written report on how the robot works, and present their design to engineers and marketers at Panasonic.

At Newark Academy, Panasonic is a young but rapidly growing program. When the Robotics and Engineering Club, advised by physics and engineering teacher Mr. Bitler, was founded five years ago, students were very interested in entering competitions. The First Robotics competition, an international tournament that pits hundred-pound robots against each other in on-field challenges, seemed attractive but was not feasible given the amount of time and money needed to compete. 

However, the club discovered the Panasonic Creative Design Challenge, a competition hosted by NJIT that includes around fifty schools from the New Jersey area. With only two rounds of competition, a low participation cost, and thousands of dollars in prize awards to the top three teams, the Robotics Club quickly jumped at the opportunity. Since its inception four years ago, the Panasonic team has consistently improved its standings: while in its first year the team was unable to make it past preliminaries, it placed third at finals in its second year, and second overall last year.

This year’s challenge is modeled on a car manufacturing plant: a wooden model car body is seated on a pair of metal rails and moves down the track according to a programmed Arduino chip. As the car body stops along the track, the main robot — a three-wheeled carriage supporting a moveable mechanical arm, connected to a controller — carries out a variety of tasks, such as picking up and placing foam body panels on the car. One challenge of the competition is to creatively design a robot using limited materials: the rulebook restricts the materials to a small set of arts and crafts supplies and basic robotics equipment, as well as limiting the number of motors the robot can have.

This year’s Panasonic team is led by seniors Jocelyn Tolpin and Matthew Lim, as well as junior Albert Anwar. In addition, the core team is assisted by several “helpers” recruited from the Robotics Club, including senior Lance Tan and juniors Rebecca Slater, Allen Zhu, Charles Pan, and Libby Stein. At the preliminary round of competitions on February 2, the team showcased their robot at the Panasonic Headquarters, earning an astounding 74 out of 70 possible points. The robot not only completed all the tasks to earn full points, but also completed the course quickly enough — well under the maximum 5 minutes — to earn bonus points. However, several wires broke, and the robot was not flawless; the team plans to rebuild it before the finals in March.

As finals approach, the team has very high hopes for the robot. As Mr. Bitler shared, “We have a superb team and a superb robot — but part of it depends on luck, part of it depends on the competition.” If the team places first this year, not only do they win a prize of $15,000 – a reward even greater than the $9,000 won last year – but also an impressive trophy. Mr. Bitler added, “We have one of the best teams we’ve ever had, and so far we have a robot that’s performing very well. It’s a superb group, some of the ‘top-notchiest’ students in the school.” Allen Zhu ‘18, a first-year member who has helped the team throughout the winter, commented “I am very confident the team will win. We put a lot of time and work into it, and I think everything’s going to come together in the end.” Jocelyn Tolpin ‘17, one of the team leaders, shared, “The Panasonic team expects great success in the coming weeks!”