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!"

Comments

Re:Looks boring this year...

[MooseGuy529]

I'm kind of disappointed as a programmer since it's all going to come down to lack of mechanical failures and driver skill.

What are you talking about? You have a robot vision system to program! You should be excited! For years FIRST has left software to be a last-minute glued-on part of the robot, programmed in PBASIC for lack of an alternative. We now have PIC micros, and they're giving us vision systems and lots of fun sensors to play with. This is going to make it a lot more fun.

One thing I would like to see in future years is a longer autonomous period. Fifteen seconds is great, but it still has the problem that it's not long enough to put your robot in the place of making a decision--most robots just execute a predetermined "dance" of motions, sometimes with IR beacons, vision sensors, or other stuff as aids. What I wanna see is a little decision-making, i.e. should I go for that vision tetra or is an alliance partner there? Can I block that opponent from putting that tetra on, etc...