It’s kind of an unspoken rule in the jungles of academia for students within a certain age range that math and science aren’t the cool things to be interested in.

However, that rule is more than kind of not true and, for a while now, students in Mars have been proving it.

The Mars Robotics Association team recently took home an award at the state FIRST Tech Challenge for the fourth year straight and the things their robots do — and the way the students have figured out how to make them do them — are pretty cool.

This year marks the group’s first mechanical award, and what did the robot designed by the team, MARS: Curiosity?, do?

Something seemingly simple, but deceptively difficult: It picked up colored balls, sorted them and shot them into a hoop.

That may seem like an easy task — it’s something humans can accomplish with widely varying degrees of success without too much thought. But if you look beneath the surface, it’s not as easy as it seems.

A human is relying on a lifetime of practice and muscle memory, in combination with a staggering number of minute calculations of necessary force based on distance and target placement, coordination of hundreds of muscle and resultant body movements and adjustments for conditions outside the body, all within a span of milliseconds, while coping with all the other calculations needed just to maintain balance and keep up basic life functions while doing it.

There’s been a wealth of studies on the difficulty of just throwing a ball and the subconscious calculations it takes, including from Harvard and Pitt.

To be clear, getting a robot to successfully perform what a human can — such as picking up, sorting and shooting balls at a target — requires taking a different approach than the one our brain uses itself.

But that’s kind of the cool part.

The Mars team didn’t win its award this year for a robot that was the most successful at those tasks. It won for a robot that took an innovative approach to part of the overall challenge. The team’s robot was built on a ball chassis, allowing its wheels to move at the same speed in any direction. The result was a robot that maintained stability with improved mobility that was equal any way the team wanted it to go.

Finding a way to get a machine to do that is pretty cool.

— JP