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High School Robotics Competition Kicks Off
DeviceGuru writes "Some 35,000 high school students from over 1500 high schools in eight countries today began competing in the annual US FIRST student robotics contest. This year's competition, dubbed FIRST Overdrive, challenges the student teams to build semi-autonomous robots that will move 40-inch diameter inflatable balls around a playing field and score the most points. In this year's game, two alliances of three teams each work collaboratively to win each round. An animated simulation of the game (in several video formats) is available online."
The new hybrid period at the beginning of the match is where we'll really get to see teams "shine" (pun intended); You see, in the past teams usually just programed a direct control system and maybe some of the more savvy teams did some dead reckoning for an autonomous mode- Now teams are going to have to figure out just what predictive programming is, and are going to have to design their own method of conveying commands. Personally I'm expecting the majority of teams to use IR, but as I said, some teams are going to be very clever and use something completely unorthodox, and that's the best part of the competition imho.
In FIRST, the best teams are usually the ones that have the big-name sponsors (Motorola, GM, Delphi, etc.), meaning a lot more equipment, money, and professional mentors. Whether this is causal is uncertain, but the correlation seems to be there.
As a mentor I contribute my time and expertise for free to a local school who has competed for several years. I can say it is both highly stressful and highly fun at the same time. Both the high-school kids and mentors enjoy it a lot and it is really intense. I have seen several kids who had never previously considered messing with this "sciency stuff [sic]" get involved and completely change their minds about what they thought was cool and what they were going to consider going to college for. I am also very impressed by the solutions that are successfully built for the challenges. Dealing with the time limits, scavenging for parts, keeping things within specs, and conceiving/building a successful design would be a challenge even for adults. Its a great real world like experience for the kids.
I was the chief programmer on my team when I was in high school and every year I saw that programming became less and less important to the event and it was more engineering and marketing based. Its really disappointing and this year sounds like they just build a robot and drive it around, autonomous is becoming less and less important and its no longer 100% autonomous this year.