By William Dowd / marblehead@wickedlocal.com
Posted May 15, 2013 at 12:01 AMUpdated May 15, 2013 at 3:20 PM
By William Dowd / marblehead@wickedlocal.com
Posted May 15, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated May 15, 2013 at 3:20 P




Last month, acting on their mutual appetite for creating and building things together, friends George Kim and Cameron Howell, both 14, participated in this year’s Artisan’s Asylum Autonomous Combat Robots Competition.
Last month, acting on their mutual appetite for creating and building things together, friends George Kim and Cameron Howell, both 14, participated in this year’s Artisan’s Asylum Autonomous Combat Robots Competition.
Think battlebot wars that you’ve seen on TV whereby people build their own mobile robot that they then use to compete head to head in an arena. Sounds fun, right?
Beating out college students that also participated, the pair impressively placed third. The two 14-year-olds’ involvement came after Kim got word that Artisan’s Asylum, a Somerville-based haven for crafty-inclined folks, would be hosting a week-long robot build-a-thon, which would culminate with a public tournament. George and his dad, Taeuk Kim, invited Cameron and his dad, Brian Howell, along.
For a week, their dads picked the their sons up from school, and they made the hour-long trek into Somerville.
“We’re pretty good friends, and when he told me about this competition, it sounded so cool,” said Cameron, casually adding that they had already built stuff out of salvaged cardboard, plastic PVC pipe, found parts and other random, little things.
“We’ve built lots of stuff, mostly sculptures,” said George. ”[The Asylum] is a great place because of the openness and community there; everyone is willing to help you build. They had one person there who makes just random bikes.”
He added, “My dad and I participated in an event they held last year, and it was a hovercraft competition that was really fun, so I figured this battlebot one would be just as great.”
Each of the eight teams that participated were provided a fully-functional robot base with four wheels. Everyone had access to the Asylum’s decked-out machinery shops and fabrication areas. The only stipulations in the competition were that each team had a week to finish their robots, and that it had to weigh between 5 to 10 pounds and function without a human controlling it.
“They supplied the processor to make the robot work, but it doesn’t have any programming in it to make it work, so basically the task was to computer program everything,” said Brian Howell, who is a trained engineer. “In robotics, everything is sensor-related, and the idea in this case was to program it to know where the other robot it’s competing against is.”

Part of that complex programming process was getting the robot to steer on its own and charge at the other robot once in the arena, according to Howell.
On the programming aspect, Taeuk, who works in the software industry, said, “We spent quite a bit of time programing the robot. We had to always think about how to spend our time each night because we had a limited amount of time.”
If teams got stuck while programing, the Artisan’s Asylum had world-class robot builders and programmers on hand to help competitors, according to the competition’s website.
Once the programming was completed, the second half involved outfitting the robot with its metal armor and weapons.
“Midway through the week, I was talking to Taeuk, looking around Cam’s room to get some themes for the robot because we didn’t want our robot to be boxy like everyone else’s,” said Brian Howell. He added that Cameron’s room provided him with an “aha moment.”
He saw a figure from the ultra-popular smartphone game Angry Birds dangling from Cameron’s ceiling, so he brought the idea to the guys, who very much liked it. They soldered metal together, drilled wheels on, glued on ping-pong balls as eyes and painted the robot’s body pitch black with a yellow beak, which served as a scooper to shove robots off the stage in the competition. The “Angry Bot” was born.
“We noticed that other robots had ramps built on them and rope to tie around other robots,” said Cameron. “Our backup plan was pretty much to have the robot look mean, so we had some fun with it.”

On competition day, Wednesday, April 23 at Arts at the Armory, in Somerville, the guys described the packed arena as looking the way one might expect for a professional wrestling cage match.
“The robots think on their own, so you don’t know the outcome of the match, so sometimes the outcome is you don’t fall off,” said Taeuk. “There were plenty of pushing matches, robots running off the stage and malfunctions.”
He explained their team actually had one of the longest matches, lasting a whole three minutes.
“They had to call the match because neither of our robots were going off the stage,” said Taeuk.
“When we went to the competition, we didn’t think we’d even place,” said Cameron. “It felt good to win, but we didn’t expect to get that far being our first time.”



Friends George Kim and Cameron Howell, both 14, hold up the robot, dubbed ‘Angry Bot,’ that they built and competed with in the Artisan’s Asylum Autonomous Combat Robots Competition last month. The pair won third place, beating out college students who participated in the event.