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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!"
do the games start with WOPR saying, "Would you like to play a game?"
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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-
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
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
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.
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Jack Higgs
Programmer / Mentor / Parent
Team Fusion #364
Gulfport High School, Gulfport, Mississippi, USA
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.
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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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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