The machine doesn't have a brain: It's got dozens, all belonging to township high school students.



That collective ingenuity designed, built and prodded Evil Machine 4-Bingo, a battery-powered robot, to crush its mechanical kin earlier this month at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Competition regional in Trenton.

In fact, the 45-member Raider Robotix team went undefeated.

"Once the game started, we just basically won," said 18-year-old senior Corey Balint.

The win returns the high school to among the elite in the international competition following two years of less-than-stellar results.

Built for speed and power, Evil Machine 4-Bingo gave no comfort to its opponents at Sovereign Bank Arena. The team's radio-controlled contraption outpaced, outshot and, on occasion, out and out outsmacked the competition, garnering two team awards, a mentoring award and an award for team coach Wayne Cokeley.

This year's game at the competition, called Aim High, entailed having robots launch 7-ounce multicolored foam balls about the size of a volleyball toward goals. Each match consisted of four periods of different types of competition, the first of which, called the autonomous round, saw the programmed robot functioning all on its own.

During the subsequent three periods, human hands, craft and cunning helped dictate the flow of play via remote control.

But the championship match's first period proved surprising — and stressful: Evil Machine was shut out, and the team found itself trailing 34-0.

"Our whole strategy is to win the autonomous round," said freshman Kirsten Guevarra, 14. "People can set up their autonomous mode to purposely mess us up."

But the team motto — "There's nothing beyond our reach" — proved apt.

After a bit of tweaking in between rounds to change the machine's throwing reach, Evil Machine notched it up, and in the end outscored the competition 78-71.

The team had six weeks, beginning in January, to design and build the robot. Scouting and strategizing also consumed team members' time and energy.

On his own, Balint will head to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland to scout other teams ahead of the national finals, which take place in Atlanta at the end of April. The Raider Robotix crew will be there, too.

Half a dozen technicians from Bristol-Myers Squibb, the team sponsor, function as mentors and advisers.

"Any question that we have, they have an answer for," Balint said. "I know so much more than I expected . . . We're learning all this but we're still having fun. That's the key, having fun."

Knowledge takes commitment, though.

"It's a year-round thing, including summer," said sophomore Shane Ogunnaike, 16.

"It takes a lot of time," 18-year-old senior Vishal Ramami said. "I'm really glad I dropped varsity tennis the more time I spend here."

Although success for the North Brunswick Township High School robotics team is not new — it is the competition's most decorated team in New Jersey and won the national championship in 2000 — enthusiasm and pride were palpable at the team's first post-competition meeting last week.

Evil Machine 4-Bingo, however, was nowhere to be seen. It was in Las Vegas, awaiting its handlers for another regional competition at the end of the month.

A few of Evil Machine's predecessors, nearly all with notable pedigrees, lie dormant on a head-high shelf in a small room adjacent to the robotics team's classroom lab.

Ogunnaike said that, although there's a winning lineage coursing through the machines, competition demands innovation.