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" As the six-week build portionof the 2010 FIRST Robotics competition comes to an end, teams hope they&amp;#039;ve constructed just the right sort of robot to withstand an intense soccer-playing showdown. After last year&amp;#039;s Lunacy game, in which robots threw &amp;quot;moon rocks&amp;quot; into trailers, this year&amp;#039;s Breakaway game offers new hurdles for students (and their bots). PM spoke with teams from schools across the country to learn what strategies will be key at regionals, and at the FIRST championship in mid-April. Here&amp;#039;s how this year&amp;#039;s challenge, Breakaway, works: Giant bumps, which act as robot-flip hazards and send balls sailing, divide the field into thirds with a tower bisecting each. A tunnel provides passage under each of the two towers. Teams must navigate the field over the bumps or through the tunnels and kick the ball into one of two goals. They score extra points for climbing and hanging onto a tower in the last few minutes of the game. Teams from across the U.S. puzzled away at strategies, from the laid-back &amp;quot;don&amp;#039;t worry about lifting and hanging at the end, that&amp;#039;s only worth a few points,&amp;quot; to the perfectionist &amp;quot;from the beginning, we knew that hanging and lifting was the main challenge.&amp;quot; And though the many hours spent crafting the ideal soccer star have been riddled with success and defeat, all teams now eagerly await competition day\u2014the ultimate test.  Did teams spend enough time on programming? Enough focus on getting over obstacles? Only game day will tell, but after a frenzied build process these exhausted yet excited kid engineers have a thing or two to say about what works and what doesn&amp;#039;t. Here are the four hairiest robot-building challenges teams faced this year, and what a few teams have done to tackle them: Kicking Maneuvering and kicking is a game of precision, and teams had different thoughts on how to design a robot to kick a ball from point A to point B. Team Overdrive, from Bridgewater, N.J., combined bungee cords and surgical tubing to make a tensioning device that could rocket the ball from 2 feet to a full 60 feet, even farther than the field is long. The team&amp;#039;s main goal with this kicker was adjustability, and with the help of a camera to determine range, the team hopes to easily adapt to opponents&amp;#039; kicking strategies.  Milford, Michigan&amp;#039;s Team 67, part of last year&amp;#039;s winning alliance, instead assembled a motor-centered system that could lift its bot off the ground in true soccer style. By using a garage-door spring, the team gave the kicker enough torque to kick the ball, then used two Fisher Price motors to drive the kicker back. A window motor on a worm drive pushes a lead screw, which releases the kicker&amp;#039;s spring for ball-kicking action. As these kids say, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s kind of complicated.&amp;quot;  Lifting Hanging a robot off a bar in the game&amp;#039;s finale is a tough task. Though Team 67 mastered the kicking portion of the robot&amp;#039;s skill set, the process took longer than its members had hoped to accomplish it, leaving them with less time to master the final lift onto the bar. Without too much trouble, the crew enabled the bot to lift its arms, but holding its weight was another story. After crafting a super lightweight version of their bot, they had to redesign it because there just wasn&amp;#039;t enough surface area to support all of the components. Now, the bot is a little heavier but it operates as planned.  Bumps With tunnels and bumps interrupting the field, this year&amp;#039;s competition has some gnarly obstacles for teams to navigate, and because of them, at least one team undertook a major design change. Team 67 originally intended to sneak through the tunnels to maneuver more quickly, but ended up revising that plan. Instead, it traded low clearance for more components. The team&amp;#039;s bot can cross the terrain bumps faster and with more ease than expected, which they hope will make up for time lost by avoiding the tunnels.  Team 768 in Baltimore chose to navigate over the bumps from the start of the building process, anticipating that other teams might block robots from passing through the narrow tunnels in the competition. Plus, without the height constraints of the tunnel, they could build a taller bot with more surface area\u2014room for add-ons that tunnel-dwelling teams may not have. For instance, Team 768 added a crane to lift the bot onto the platform in the tower at the end of the challenge for bonus points. The students did struggle to get the bot&amp;#039;s wheels to function stably in the face of the rolling terrain, but after some careful repairs, the bot proves almost impossible to overturn.  Tunnels  New Orleans&amp;#039; Team 2091 built a compact bot\u2014low in weight and stature\u2014to squeeze through the field&amp;#039;s tunnels, avoiding the speed bumps altogether. Since the bot is heavy and low to the ground, the team isn&amp;#039;t worried about it flipping, but the students are concerned it won&amp;#039;t make it over the bumps in the event of a blocked tunnel. They&amp;#039;ve found their robot occasionally gets stuck on the hand-built ramp, and they fear it might be impeded on the competition field too.  Like Team 768, Team 2091 also had trouble with their wheels\u2014in this case, struggling to fit a bicycle-style chain around them. And once assembled, only one side of the bot&amp;#039;s wheels functioned properly, leaving the other side of the bot stuck, the wheels jammed in place. Plus, faulty wiring turned the bot in erratic directions\u2014if the team ordered it to turn left, it might turn right, left, or not at all. With some time, all issues were resolved, and the team&amp;#039;s betting that its speedy bot will out-race competitors on game day.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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