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BEST Robotics Competition Kicks Off Challenge 2004
His Eminence writes "The Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology (BEST) robotics competition has formally unveiled its 2004 challenge, dubbed 'BEST FEVER':'Alas, poor Squeaky has been feeling under the weather. Squeaky has a severe case of BEST FEVER. His system must be treated radically. Only gene therapy can cure him, his DNA must be repaired.' Teams have already started designing and building their 'unique' robot for this challenge."
Well if he has DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), then he really does have a problem. I mean... he's a robot, right?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Um, they've been living in a cave for ten years and never saw "FIRST" and just came up with "BEST"?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
... I hope they do not become this after robots manipulating their dna...
Your head a splode
I competed in BEST last year and after winning first place at Capitol BEST (Austin Area), my team went to Texas BEST(Tri-State Competition) and we recieved 5th place in the competition. This is year I was not on the team because my coach left and the new group was not very appealling to me, anyways I know from one of my friends that the Capitol BEST competition happened yesterday and that the BEST topic had been announced 6 weeks ago. The only thing new now is that teams are begging to qualify for the "national" level competitions. Anyways after saying that now it is time for my ranting on the competition. First of all the electronics in the kit which each team is provided are very basic, ony have one four channel controller, 3 servos, 2 large motors and 2 small motors. These electronics often fail, at unexpected time and the judges at the contest almost always blame your soldering skills and robot setup until the try the equipment on something else and realized it sucks. The most annoying part is that the controller is in now way programmable to even receive complex commands you have two joysticks and to get the robot to use both wheels while turning you have to make the controls for the wheels on the diagonal axises of the auto centering stick and use the other stick to control the motors. The robots come nowhere near autonomous and they engineering aspect which is stressed so highly by the competition is really just learning to deal with faulty equipment and hold your temper while talking to dumbasses.
The BEST Robotics competetions are rather simple, yet it teaches many things. I did it for the four years in high school. Good stuff. I went to the Texas Brazos Competetions yesterday, which the team I was mentoring won 1st place.
Check out their site at http://www.tiger-robotics.org/
or the middle school's site http://csms-robotics.dyndns.org/
I think their not bad for website coded by hand by high school and middle school students.
"Well, it was a girl robot, you see, and I had a lot of time on my hands" -What goes on between and a geek and his robot should be kept private!
Go 1038!
:-)
FIRST incorporates computer animation too (I led the team that won a regional animation award two years ago) but it's definitely a side event that really has nothing to do with the rest of the competition. There's also a lot of PR involved that actually does affect the competition (hoping that some really good team will pick you to be their partner in the finals). Still, the more fields they can incorporate, the more people can become a part of FIRST.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Im in a best team and were going to state and our robot only mangaed to get 6 points on our own. But we had good documataion on the part of the competition called the book so were going to state.
(im in the sa best division and my team is the Taft G-nomes state to us is Texas Best)
http://taftbest.org/
http://sabest.org/
http://www.texasbest.org/
It is similar to FIRST only in its values and principles.... FIRST is a more expensive competition with more corporate sponsord and such. BEST is quite inexpensive, so even middle schools can compete. It's a lot of fun actually!
Yeah, Capitol BEST competition was just this Saturday. The topic and rules were announced 6-weeks ago.
I was part of the ill-equipped Westwood team
As you might assume, we got owned, but we did have the coolest design.
The DNA theme is pretty thin. There are no real laboratory robotics in the competition. Instead, Roche is leveraging the BEST competition to help distribute their genetics educational CD (linked from the BEST homepage). I suppose it IS a good way to distribute a positive spin on gene testing (don't get me wrong, I am FOR the technology), but why not take advantage of a real need. Laboratory automation is full of robotics and I am sure young minds could contribute to the development of better systems.
Hey Roche, why not sponsor a lab related competition next year?
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
I admit... the challenge is corny... But you have to look deeper at the actual competition and tech behind it all...
They may be BEST but they're not FIRST
SPAM
As a current BEST team member (4th and final year sadly) BEST revolves little around "real" science. They just use it to base a story off of. BEST is awesome because unlike FIRST, there is no cost teams. I know in Dallas BEST Texas Instruments pays for it. Other places, I don't know who pays. BEST gives you a box of parts, and says have fun, complete this task, and you have 6 weeks. It gives you awesome experience. You learn the applications of building things, not just theory. (such as the limit switch issue we are having now theory went to heck about three days ago.)
If you want to see our BEST bot (note: we've got two weeks left, its not done yet!) Here she is We are one of two all girls teams in Dallas BEST.
What about FIRSTs Lego league? Many middle schools do not have the technical capacity to construct these robots, while a Lego robot is very cheap.
"Guess what! I got a (BEST) FEVER! And the only prescription, is more (BEST) COWBELL!"
That's right. All your base.
http://nikg43.sourceforge.net/best/
I helped some friends build their bot. Ours was special because we used the printer as the body/frame. It was their first year their school was competing, so it was all new to us. We didn't have a reverse but it did have zero turning radius. I don't think we won anything but it was still fun.
It had a griping arm to pick up the balls since they were worth the most points. It really couldn't do anything else.
I was part of the William Fremd team 2001-2003. We kicked so much booty its not funny.
Anyway, I think the challenge is kind of corney. Robots don't have DNA. Under that, though, the actual engineering challenge is kind of cool. You can only use a VERY limited set of parts. Designing a robot out of plywood, cardboard, and duct tape is not that easy*.
As for the challenge, the challenges have always been silly (RAD to the Core was an exception). I think this is to get younger kids (11-13) interested and exicted. The older kids look over the "fix Squeaky's DNA" bit and look at it as a chance to prove they can build a robot in six weeks out of a bucket of miscelaneous junk.
*Yeah, it's hard. I have competed in BEST for the last four years and this is only the second robot I have helped build that works worth a darn. Check out our teams website: http://www.projectneo.net/
Yeah, FIRST is really expensive. Our team had a total budget of over $12,000 (US), including the entry fee. To put that in perspective, there are some teams with >$50,000 budgets. Our team budget for BEST, however is about $200 (for t-shirts and office supplies).
BEST was really designed to allow more people to be able to enter a cheaper competition and open up the field of engineering to a greater body of students.
the teams can design a robot to repair the DNA of an exploded webserver?
If I wanna sponsor a BEST team outside of Malaysia, how best to proceed ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !