FIRST Robotics Competition Starts Today

cscx writes: "Today is the kickoff day of the 2002 FIRST Robotics Competition. For those of you that don't know what FIRST (Dean Kamen, Segway, IT) is, it's an organization meant to interest high-school students in science and engineering by giving them 6 weeks to build a complete functioning robot. (By the way, FIRST is what most likely inspired BattleBots) Teams, although they require funding to pay for the kits, receive many different mechanical and electrical (the programmable control system kicks ass! :) parts in the kits, along with full copies (donated by the companies) of Autodesk Inventor, Character Studio, 3D Studio Max, and Reactor, as well as Microsoft Office XP, Frontpage, and Project. There is a live webcast of the kickoff, with an unveiling of the game at 11:00 EST." Update: 01/05 16:15 GMT by T : Here's a link to the webcast information page; the webcast is available in WMF and RealMedia formats, and will be archived as RealMedia.

Comments

You're wrong.

[c_g_hills]

FIRST is what most likely inspired BattleBots

Actually Battlebots is a rip off of the British Robot Wars.

Hints About the Game

[cscx]

Although the game will be kept a secret till 11 AM EST, they have unveiled some hints:

1. The kickoff is taking place in a hockey rink
2. Playground balls have been 'thrown' across the stage
3. Basketball-lookalike balls have been thrown onto the stage as well
4. Some sort of octagonal movable cart with PVC pipe extending into the air (looks like a type of goal) was mysteriously wheeled onto the stage...

They have said that there will be more room for 'roughing' in this year's game... roughing, one of the most fun part of the competitions, had been seriously downplayed in last year's competition.

Dean also said that Disney is in some super-secret marketing scheme with the Segways to "make them available more quickly..." with something to do with the Regional and National competions. It will be unveiled in a few weeks.

Correction...

[starman97]

Survival Research Labs is what inspired Battlebots.

JPL & 2001 FIRST

[spaceland]

Last year I visited JPL while they were having their Open House. It was a very cool day that included some great behind-the-scenes stuff, and many of the 2001 FIRST competitors robots were on display as well. I shot some video and posted it to Reality Feed, check it out.

Re:Early Introduction to ENG fields == Good;

[chialea]

You have a point, but as someone who has participated in this more than once, it's a rather idealistic one. Most teams are actually run by the engineers: design, construction, programming, everything. Students are relegated to cheerleaders during the competition. And General Motors isn't the only offender. When my team made it to the semi-finals, most teams were shocked, simply becasue we were not engineer-built. (we had some engineers, mostly from Xerox PARC, but they were mainly there in a supervisory capactiy -- as in "there must be an adult in the shop" and to conduct design reviews) I realize that not all of the teams have the necessary background for this sort of work, but it really isn't teaching them much of anything. It's tolerated becasue "they might learn something, and that's better than nothing", which has the effect of discouraging other teams from designing and building their own robots.

As for females, I was one of them. You will see women on these teams, but most often as cheerleaders, on both the engineer-built and the student-built teams. I'm not making any statements about who chose that role for them, simply noting that there are very few women who are, for example, drivers or part of the pit crews. And if you are part of the pit crew, people from OTHER TEAMS will not pay attention to you and push you out of the way in an effort to look at your robot (information gathering, not real curiosity). I simply hope they don't treat their own members like that.

And it's not that the companies donate kits. They donate money (part of which goes to pay the entry fee, and if you pay the entry fee, you get the kit -- which is NOT all the materials you need); they donate engineer's time; they donate use of their shops.

Lea

For those interested in the parts

[olin01]

For anyone interested in a very basic overview of the parts (possibly below the level of slashdot geeks...), Olin College created a tutorial for new teams at http://first.robotics.olin.edu. Right now, the college's connection seems to be overwhelemed; a mirror is at http://www.logicalrealism.org/first/. It also includes some of the systems discussed in the kickoff, namely the light-sensor tracker and a thrower.

MIT Robots

[heliocentric]

But why does everyone think media hyped robot vs. robot competitions were the start of things? MIT for years put students against students building robots from the same set of materials for the battle arena of who can collect the most ping-pong balls. This competition was great, it was not only interesting, but the behind the scences views of the creators working on their robot setups, and the insight into strategy* was also interesting. The modern day over hyped, cartoonized naming, and street fighter-esq "battles" are so crappy compared to the good MIT battles. Anyone remember when the top builders from MIT went to China to work in teams of two (one MIT'er one Chinese) to get around a language barrior to develop robots?

* - there seemed to be two prevailing strategies: one was to put as many ping-pong balls into your base/hole/area/whatever the other was to put just a few (sometimes just one) and then block your opponents ability to put any (or few) into their base/hold/area/whatever.