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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.
I helped First test this out, but now it seems to have gone international. First Lego League International . It's pretty cool - here though the challanges are known before when building your robot, and you are giving a Lego Mindstorms kit and can use your own components. It's mainly for late elementry or jr.high school - but it can be mentered by anyone. It was a LOT of fun when I did it except the other team destroeyd our robot...
In my opinion, the kids would learn more if corporations got out of it. It's always apparent when some kid brings a project to school that you know his parents put together for him, and that's what this looks like. What's the point? Sit the kid down in front of a couple hours of junkyard wars, give them a Lego mindstorm set (at the most) and then let them do the work.
And all the cheering just makes it a little too much like those friday night high school football games. uh, thanks, but no.
On the topic of high school robotics...
I was involved in a high school robotics competition called Botball, organized by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics. This program involved constructing autonomous robots out of Lego Technic parts, using Interactive C to write programs to control them.
The controller used was MIT's Handyboard, and the Botball game involved collecting ping pong balls and other such items to be depostited in a goal to score points (with various complexities coming into play). One part of the competition was head-to-head; two teams' robots then battled it out to see who could score more points.
The Botball program offers high school students exposure to engineering and software development concepts, as well as problem solving with specific goals and deadlines, all in a team setting. With competition at the regional and national levels, the program is challenging and rewarding for students. And it's a lot of fun too.
I'm on a FIRST team, and the engineers don't run us... not by far. My best friend is the main programmer for the robot (it's not that hard), the main builder and robot designer, and also the robot operator, I'm the head 3D animator, and the daughter of the head of the team is the designer (awesome... awesome artist). The engineers we have only help out a little bit... the original engineer who did the programming for the robot was absolutely horrible.
We all know about the other teams we face that are run by engineers, and we still beat them. Every year we've gone to the nationals in florida... It's a shame that the engineers in other teams are taking all the work away from the kids... the learning experience you get from being on the team (and participating... not cheerleading) is enoumous, and the engineers should just sit back a little more, and let the kids do more of the work...
Before now I had no reason to post, so I never gotten a username and password, so at the moment I am waiting for my password. I don't like all the FIRST bashing taking place here. My brother is onto his third year participating. His first year, he was on the Nortel Networks Team from the Rochester, NY area. Last year and this year he is on the Gleason Works/Fairport High School Team. The past two years he has been the principal programmer, and I suspect that he will be again this year. FIRST, as Dean states, does not include the word "education" in its name. FIRST is an acronym for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology". As for the time to explain the rules, the actual time to explain the rules for this year's competition took only half an hour plus Q&A time. The time allotted allows for the not quite so important stuff (i.e. Thanking the Nationwide Sponsors [Microsoft, Fed Ex, Disney, etc.]). They've simplified the scoring a little this year, in exchange for a more devious way of getting points. There are 3 moveable goals that are worth 10 points each if they are in your goal zone, at the opposite end of your home zone. Every robot in your home zone is worth 10 points for your team. And every ball in a goal in your goal zone is worth 1 point. Now the devious part is that to maximize your score, you must make sure that your opponent's score stays no more than 1 point below yours, as your final score (if you win the match) is 3 times that of your opponent's score for that match. In addition to the scoring rules, there is a weight limit, and a spending limit (for functional parts). I don't see how that is confusing at all. The most confusing part is how to implement everything. On to the building time issue, my brother's teams were quite involved in building their past robots, and still had late nights towards the end, due to various set backs. The time allotted to build the robots, I feel, is too short for the amount of time the students can put into working on it during those 6 weeks, that is the ONLY thing I find fault with in FIRST, and it is NOT a good enough reason to bash them. FIRST has been around for only about 10 years, so it is still in it's infancy, but with 660 teams it is still growing. As technology changes, so will FIRST, and the FIRST competitions will get more challenging, devious, and interesting as time progresses. Nathanial C. Jones http://www.phantomcow.com
I am the captain of FIRST Team 98, Dallas, TX.
We will not be able to compete this year.
You see, we are one of the few teams without any form of engineering support from a large corporation. All we have is some donated framing. We have been able to survive until this year, because the requirements for registration were just to sign up. Now there is a 'point' system to even get on a waiting list. It is almost impossible to get in if you don't WIN a regional match. That means you must enter many, many regionals to have a good shot at nationals.
These registrations cost a very large amount of money. In the past, registration for nationals was $6,000, and regionals were about the same. To have a fair shot of getting in, I have calculated that my team must spend at least $15-20k in registrations alone. The robot would cost another $4,000, far exceeding my school's $12,000 budget for the team.
I'm sure we could find a NASA, United Tech, or Delphi sponsor for engineering, but then we would no longer do most of the work. We decided that the best way to go was sponsor-less, in the hopes that we would recieve experience in building the thing, as we did last year. It was a great learning experience, and great fun too.
We now must decide what to do. Sell out, or close shop. Rest in peace, US FIRST.
-twb
I was in FIRST a couple of years ago. My school wound up in about the middle of the pack in the Michigan state finals in Pontiac. The winning team had a brilliant design for manipulating the playground balls that are central to the game.
If anyone out there is planning on competing, DON'T USE A CLAW DESIGN. It's not reliable, and it's quite slow, as well. Instead, go with the simpler and much more effective "loop" design. Build two metal circles just a bit wider than the ball's diameter and cover them with the red, grippy textured rubber that comes in the construction kits. Then, mount the two circles an inch or two apart at the end of your manipulation arm, and put a pneumatic pump inside the arm with some more of the grip material at the end of the piston. To move balls, just get the loops over the ball, then activate the pump to lock it in place. This will work much better than a claw which, despite looking really cool, will very frequently drop the ball when jarred.
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