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2005 FIRST Robotics Competition Announced
Gothic_Walrus writes "Dean Kamen strikes again! The 2005 game for FIRST Robotics was announced today through an international sattellite feed provided by NASA. Dubbed 'Triple Play,' the game features two groups of three robots competing to stack pyramid-shaped pieces and to align them in rows. Think Tic-Tac-Toe, but three-dimensional. This game should be a challenge for the 1,000+ active teams in FIRST, which are located throughout the U.S. and Canada (and even Brazil). Video of the game can be found here. Go 818!"
First Robotic Post
Go 281!
;)
Good Luck to all participating teams
do the games start with WOPR saying, "Would you like to play a game?"
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
My team made it all the way to the finals at Epcot (Disneyworld, FL, USA).
GO 1006!
Thats nice and all, but its not exactly smart to post videos w/o a bittorrent link or something. Not that I wouldn't do it anyway just to make slashdotters not able to see the video.
thisnukes4u.net
Pardon me for being out-of-the-loop here, but who is team 818? Are they the Slashdot team or something?
So the robot overlords of the future can have a missing link, just like us.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
team 818 is the FIRST robotics team #
like Team 174 - they are at snobot.org
"The secret of building a successful team is not to assemble the largest team possible, but rather to assemble a team that can work well together. Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST.
Sigh. Now why couldn't I think of something like that?
The first challenge is to learn how to spell the word "satellite". Does no one proof-read the submissions?
They've done some things to make the programming easier and are practically forcing us to use this camera vision system when most veteran teams didn't bother with infrared sensors that were available last year, which basically destroys any competitive advantage our team (217) seems to have had. (always mechanical problems) I'm kind of disappointed as a programmer since it's all going to come down to lack of mechanical failures and driver skill.
-insert a witty something-
Pusher and Shover?
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
In the UK, one of the channels BBC, has robot comp.'s each and every year, this involves different robots doing all SORTS of tasks, from swimming, running (2legs), climbing ropes etc etc.
Also we have Robot Wars where robotic vehicals would battle it out etc, yet none of this ever makes BIG news such as this.
Is it just because this has N.A.S.A backing that everyone is sitting up and taking notice, or is there something unique about this?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Go 639 wooo wooooooooo! Heres to another great year!
Thank you wonderful slashdot buddies... Teams have many large files that we have to download today :) (you can only imagine the speed).
The game really isnt anything like tic-tac-toe, more like stack the tetras on the other tetras. You get extra points for getting lines, across, diagonal or verticle. (this part is similar to tic-tac-toe, but it is not the point of the game)
From Team 263
Oh God. I hope Reid Barton hasn't entered this one yet. Or else its over.
I wonder who was on the lowest team number. Low numbers are good like slashdot account numbers. I was on 63. w00t!
Just a minor correction to the original post, FIRST teams are located all over the world. If you go to the FIRST website they have an interactive map that shows where teams are from. Last year I was able to help reprogram the robot for an Equidorian team (their keyboard was is Spanish!) and work with a team from England. This year there are even 10 new teams in Israel.
Dean Kamen will tell you, FIRST isn't about building robots. It's about building our future.
------------
Jack Higgs
Programmer / Mentor / Parent
Team Fusion #364
Gulfport High School, Gulfport, Mississippi, USA
It's because FIRST is for young people.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
I have successfully tied my dick in a knot
FIRST teams are made up of high school students, people who would never be able to experience this otherwise. The competition isn't an issue - FIRST provides the game every year. The money can be hard to come by, but donations from large companies such as General Motors (our sponsor) or from other groups or individuals take care of a large portion of that. Supervision isn't hard to find either; most teams are led by engineers, teachers, and other volunteers.
The main empasis of FIRST is not the game itself - as Dean said today, "the robot is just a vehicle, no pun intended." FIRST emphasizes what is known as "gracious professionalism" - in essence, remembering that playing fairly and developing respect and possibly even friendship for your opponents should NEVER come after winning the game. FIRST is trying to get students to become interested in engineering, in math and science. The UK may be different, but America needs those people to fill the holes in the already-falling number of technically skilled employees.
It may sound corny and stupid, but the main goal of FIRST is literally to change the world. I'd bet that the BBC shows aren't going to benefit society quite as much in the long run. :)
Goo goo g'joob.
The FIRST Competition can only be competed in by highschool teams. That said, they almost always have some sort of sponsorship from a large corporation or many smaller businesses. The fee for a team to go to one event was $3000 when I was on a team (GO 904!) and then $2000 for every competition after that.
Also another thing that makes this competition unique is that every team starts with the same basic kit of parts, and are limited to certain parts that they can buy separately, despite this there are often huge differences in design, usually due to game strategy theory.
The largest amount of money involved comes from sponsors and from corporations offering scholarships to team members, some of which are very generous.
Ok thats all kool,
the teams in the BBC one are all schools and colleges.
Now, in robot wars we saw some amazing stuff, some were schools, some from other places, some in it for fun, some speading $$$$$$ on their robots (we heard over £2k for some machines). The most heartbreaking part was when two "rival" teams would be fighting, and then one robot would have some kind of malfunction, and then the teams would give each other help to fix the bots, because they would rather win a fair battle (or lose) than they would just win and take the prize.
its nice to know that we still continue to care, even in times of war.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Be wery afraid.
Robots? Pyramids? Stacking things? NASA?
Are they trying to free Sutekh the Destroyer from his Pyramid of Mars?!
Oh, no one here is a Doctor Who fan... (Backs slowly out of the room, embarrassed.)
By the way, it's tetrahedrons, not pyramids... A student from Team 677: The Wirestrippers
I'm in this Robotics competition as part of team 1403 (we were noobs last year) and I think that the best part of this competition is the new paradigms that it teaches kids to think in and the tools it gives us in order to be able to control and direct the inevitable changes and advances in technology in the future. It's really about building a generation of people who will care about and be able to make a difference in the future. It's a noble goal, and I urge all of you to take a look and see if you may want to get involved. It's actually quite fun!
Allrighty. I am on a team, but I dont know wich one. Its for George Washington High School in Virginia, so hopefully we will do well. Its our first year in the competition so wish us luck!
Yay, I have a sig.
In the spirit of FIRST go ALL team, but especial 1410. For those of you not involved 1) get involved 2) FIRST encourages gracious profesionalism (spelling optional) which means helping and chearing on all teams, especially newbs.
-Tim Louden
They've really kicked it up a notch, technologically. A lot of time in previous years would be spent brainstorming, designing, and building extremely specialized mechanisms, and our team would have to spend our whole kickoff weekend picking a strategy so we could pick how the robot looks. This time, however, they have created a game that requires specialized software rather than hardware, and they have also included in the kit of parts a ready-to-assemble chassis and gearbox. The end result is that we will have a robot to work with in a week, instead of four, and the programming team can start hacking at that while the drivetrain team finishes our "real" robot with a better drivetrain.
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This is the team I mentor, 1243, second year with FIRST and we are looking forward to it. Kick off at Northville in Michigan was fun, though the workshops I attended were rather boring. I am excited about the new sensors and scripting for autonomous. Though it seems like 6 robots on the field at once is going to make it a little crowded.
Isn't building better robots another reason too?!
Since when is Nationals not called Nationals anymore? Of course, I have been out of the loop for a long time, since my last year on a team was in 1999. I was on a team 3 years in high school, and we had different team numbers on different years, but we were called the Baxter Bomb Squad.
FIRST was one of my main incentives to major in Mechanical Engineering in college, and the lessons I learned there about professional courtesy and the real purpose of competition are still influential now. I know Slashdot is read by tons of technically skilled people, and if your city has a local FIRST team you could help out with I would encourage you to do so. I know from experience how important the success of the teams is to the high school students who participate.
Hm, the wmv link isn't working for me. I can ping the host, but I can't play the stream. Mplayer hangs on "Connecting to sargasso-3.arc.nasa.gov[128.102.151.19]:80". Are there any mirrors or torrents out there?
Great. So NASA's turning into a place for Robots to play Segway Polo?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For those who aren't familiar with the US FIRST Robotics Competiton, here's a quick summary.
Dean Kamen started an organization called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) because he felt that students were not being inspired to pursue science and engineering. His usual analogy is that while we have immense respect for athletes, celebrities, and entertainers, we don't recognize engineers and scientists in the same way, and he wants to change that.
The practical implementation of this is the FIRST Robotics Competition. Each January, the kickoff from Manchester, NH is broadcast to teams across the country (and world) on NASA TV, and they find out about a new game. They also receive a kit of parts, and they then have six to seven weeks to design, build, program, practice driving, and ship a robot to play that game.
This year's game, as many are, is just complex enough that I will not try to explain it fully. Essentially, you earn points by stacking small tetrahedrons ("tetras") on the large tetra-shaped goals. There are 9 of these in a grid. You get 3 points for each tetra of your color stacked (upright) on top of a goal, and 1 point for each that is inside the goal but not stacked. Then you get 10 points for each row of 3 goals where your color is on top, and you get 10 points at the end if all three robots in your alliance (there are two alliances, red and blue, with three teams each) are in your end zone. You also receive bonus tetras (placed directly on top of the goals on your end of the field) for certain actions during autonomous mode: placing vision tetras (these have a green stripe for the camera to track) on the goals in the middle (1 bonus tetra for putting it on the side goals, 2 for the middle) and knocking down the tetras magnetically hung from the goals on your side (1 bonus tetra, and the knocked-down one stays in play; it otherwise would be removed).
The structure of the match is 15 seconds of autonomous mode, where the robots can't (electronically) receive communications, and must navigate on their own. This is made much more interesting this year by them throwing a CMUcam2 (a small serially-controllable robot vision system--quite cool!) into our bag of sensors. Then the remaining 1:45 of the match is human-controlled. Scoring is probably another "coopertition"-style deal where the winner gets 2x the loser's score or something similar to keep good teams from kicking bad teams' asses completely.
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We watched the kickoff broadcast at our own kickoff meeting (Go team 79!). The game itself seems simple in concept, yet very complex in the strategy. We already filled up 3 sheets of paper with possible autonomous mode strategies alone (both for us and alliance partners).
/. people that were at the championship last year, we should have a meet! hehe)
I'm very excited to get my hands on the software ('specially the math libs) and new compiler for this year. We've done some work with gyros already on our 2004 robot, but the math required to filter the noise was too much to run all our other sensors. The new math libs will be a treat!
Good luck to all teams! (I know there's a bunch of
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
This year FIRST has really placed the emphasis on software. They've given us an easy-to-build chassis and gearbox, a game that requires at most one manipulator (for moving tetras), and a boatload of awesome tools. We get a CMUcam2, which lets our robot track things using a camera. (This also offers some interesting possibilities for funny things, like making a cart that follows a student around as they scout teams or something... we're planning on building both the FIRST drivetrain/chassis and our own, and using the FIRST one as a testbed... I want to convert it into a human-following robot cart once we're done using it ;-) They've also apparently written lots of software modules to make it easier to use gyros, position encoders, and the like, and combined them to make a plain-text-scriptable autonomous mode thing, that allows you to write the robot instructions for what to do. (This gives teams with "intelligent" robots an advantage, as more people will take the dead-reckoning route if it's easy and reliable, so smarter bots will face less competition.) Personally I'm a programmer, and our job was usually neglected in previous years, so I look forward a great deal to a season where programming becomes a major portion of our robot, and not some little detail to be filled in at the end.
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There are kids in robotics clubs who aren't /.ers? ;)
G. Hansel
Team 19 Big Red Robotics
"If the answer isn't duct tape, you've asked the wrong question."
I participated in US FIRST back in '95 as a member of the only middle school to compete without co-teaming with an area high school--Austin Academy for Excellence of Garland, Texas. The event took place at Disney's Epcot Center, and lasted roughly four days. Though we didn't win, our team took home the All-Star Rookie Award, and we had a chance to shake hands with Kamen himself. Not bad, considering we took nearly a week off from school to attend the event at one of the nation's best theme parks. Damnit, I wish I was fourteen again.
A sig is just a sig, unless you can shoot it. Sig Steyr, for the distinguishing CT.
seeing how there's shameless promotion....
Good luck to all and Go 1137
This year is going to be incredible. For every thing they've made easier, there are a dozen other things that are still hard, both in hardware and software.
No one used the IR sensors last year because they were useless; too many sources of IR noise and reflections that are literally invisible and there were better ways to find the posts in autonomous mode. The CMUCam is much more interesting and useful. If you don't like, don't use it, but don't complain because they gave us something better this year.
FIRST has made it easier for every team to field a functional robot with an autonomous mode, which means the competition is going to be tough and teams will have to really innovate to be competitive.
With three teams on each side and pretty limited scoring possibilities, design, reliability, scouting, collaboration and strategy will all be critical. New teams will have fun competing with a functional robot and veteran teams will have to get off their laurels and find an edge. I think it's going to be a great year.
Go team 1318!
Team 824, University of Washington & Roosevelt High School. (I'm on the UW side.) The day of the kickoff it's finally sinking in that I just signed away all my weekends for the next month and a half. Normally I like being busy, but I have a feeling it'll be a big relief when this is over...
Go 1072!
speeling?
Oh my god, he's expanded his horizons from usenet and found slashdot! Run for your lives!
Whoever moderated this idiot "Informative", you should be incredibly ashamed of yourself!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Team 818 is one of about 1000 FIRST (For Inspiratation and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics teams this year. Info on Team 818 can be found at ://www.wcs.k12.mi.us/mmstc/first/first.htm
Most of these teams are looking for more programmers as these 130 pound robots operate autonomously for the first part of each 3-on-3 match (6 robots at once). For more info or to join a team, see http://www.usfirst.org
This year's competition is a big step up in many ways. For example, previously teams had to come up with their own drive trains so sometimes there were robots that went in circles. Teams now have the option of using professionally designed gear boxes with powerful motors so that won't be an issue.
Also in the last three year's, there were 4 robots competing 2-on-2 in each match. This year it will be 3-on-3 which will make for lots of action. Picture six robots, each weighing 130 pounds, zooming around a 27 by 54 foot field, initially in autonomous mode, but then being driven by pairs of students with a mentor coach (who can't touch the controls). Those mentors will be busy trying to figure out the current score so as to adjust their strategy.
I am jazzed. Last year, I had more fun with this than anything else I have done, period. This year will be even better. I consider game creation to be an art form. After all, those playing a game are often deeply involved just as they might be with a good movie play. However in some ways, a game is a superior art form because the players can influence the outcome. To mean, the FIRST Robotics Competition is at the top of the heap of games which have achieved the level of art.
go buzz!