Local team's recycling robot a hit

LEOMINSTER -- The lead programmer, electrician and driver of "Snaggle Tooth," a robot built by local students to compete in a regional robotics competition, summed up the effort needed to place sixth out of 36 teams last weekend in Springfield.

"It was hard until we learned how to do it," Cam Cardwell, 17, an electronics student in Leominster High School's Center for Technical Education Innovation program, said about the effort sponsored in part by the Boys & Girls Club of Fitchburg and Leominster.

For the 12th straight year, 18 local students from the Leominster and Fitchburg high schools, the Sizer School and Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School spent six weeks building a remote-controlled "bot" for the 2 1/2-minute competition held at the MassMutual Center.

This year's challenge was named "Recycle Rush," and teams had to design and build a 120-pound robot that could stack crates and recycling barrels and pick up litter, scoring points for each task completed.

Facing other teams of high-schoolers, many with robots built by professionals from General Motors, BAE Systems, NASA and the Clinton-based Nypro, the Terror Bots, the team's name, exceeded the high expectations of the team's mentors.

"This is, by far, the best group of students we've ever had," said Jacob Janssens, a Mount Wachusett Community College student and one of seven technical mentors who help provide the team direction.

His compliments were echoed by mentors Diana Alberti, a project manager for Comcast, Steve McNamara, a machine-shop instructor at LHS's CTEi, and Jon Blodgett, the teen-center director of the B&G Club of Leominster and Fitchburg.

The other four mentors are Bio-Techne engineer Jerry Westwood, and LHS instructors Mike Still and Todd Rathier, and Paul LaFebvre, who helps in the robotics lab at the B&G Club.

While each of the 18 students had a role in the development of the robot, one member of the team, 16-year-old Olivia Houle, is a seasoned veteran with 12 years of experience. Houle, a welding student at Monty Tech, began helping her father, Scott Houle, one of the founders of the robotics team and the plant manager of Steel-Fab Inc., build "bots" when she was only 4.

She provided all the welding for "Snaggle Tooth," so named because of the "teeth" on the lift mechanism used to grasp the crates and barrels during the competition.

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Local team's recycling robot a hit