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FIRST Robotics Competition Announced
Z80xxc! writes "FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) has officially announced the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition. This competition, started by inventor Dean Kamen, encourages high-school students to design and build robots to compete with and against other FRC teams. The competition overview video is available from NASA. This year's competition is called 'Lunacy.' The game consists of a series of 135-second face-offs during which the student-designed robots must pick up 9-inch game balls and deposit them in trailers hitched to the opposing teams' robots. The game field is coated with regolith, a slick polymer material, and special wheels are used to create a low-traction interaction with the crater's surface. Together, these combine to simulate the one-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon. For any readers who are interested in participating, FRC teams can always use more adult mentors."
None of the links in the summary work with the www in there...
I for one welcome our capitalized overlords.
Table-ized A.I.
Lunar mining? Pffft. Make them fetch us a fscking beer!
Table-ized A.I.
I participated in this competition just two years ago. Our robot would've worked a lot better had they left us programmers more than 6 hours to work with it... (darn mechanic guys always taking up more time than they should)
Anyways, it was a blast, anyone who can participate in this really ought to.
The game has a moon theme. The playing field is being called a crater due to its shape. "Regolith" should have been in quotations, as the hard polymer sheeting is being used for a visual representation only. There are no rocks and dust and other fun things. The whole point was to create a slippery surface that's hard to drive on.
Because journals are not tagged 'story', and /. seems to be moving to a different comment/story management system. Maybe they'll move to comment tagging in the future, or tag other things in addition to stories?
(Perhaps a) Better question... How do these tags work in the first place?
Why can there be a tag I've never seen before and is likely to have a very low probability of having more than one person think of - especially when that tag is not referenced in any comment below TFS?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I'm with one of the FIRST teams, and we are all looking forward to doing this competition, but given the environment it is hard to come up with a good strategy for success, any ideas? as a note the field coating is not actually regolith, it is just reference being used for the game.
The game field is coated with regolith, a slick polymer material, and special wheels are used to create a low-traction interaction with the crater's surface.
The article summary references regolith. Wikipedia defines regolith as:
[...] is a layer of loose, heterogeneous material covering solid rock. It includes dust, soil, broken rock, and other related materials [...]
I remember the days when I was a member of a FIRST robotics team and we prepared for competitions by building practice fields to test out our robot and help prepare our human players. The fields we constructed were of fairly stable objects like PVC tetrahedrons and fairly large kickballs that made it easy to simulate actual conditions in a real tournament. How are teams supposed to simulate actual conditions if the terrain is so unstable and chaotic?
So you have about a minute of autonomous robots chasing each others rears while kids lob 9 inch balls at them, followed by a minute of robots being controlled remotely by Counter Strike geeks. And it's slippery.
It gets better: another high school robotics competition is the BEST Competition (Boosting Engineering Science and Technology)
I call bullshit on this one. I'm pretty sure there have been robotics competitions before. Pretty sure as in around 99%.
Sorry.
This sounds like Battlebots...except with the fighting...or fun.
They need to build robots that spin and lift etc. and duel them out.
I am competing in team 2811. It's slightly interesting, other than the fact that 98% of the other people are both mentally and socially retarded.
[ah, mis-moderation, clearing]
The FIRST committee(which stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") has a sub-committee "Parents Of Scientists / Technologists" that I keep reading about.
Surely you've seen their ads, appearing at the top of every discussion forum. FIRST POST this, FIRST POST that...
And how come even though I've unchecked tags in the my preferences tags are still displayed?
How can THAT be interesting? Come on...
Mods are not getting the bitty humor in gp. Like me.
Dean Kamen's original vision was to promote technology careers in the United States. As FIRST has grown they have added teams from Canada, England, Brazil and Israel. Since then FIRST has toned down the nationalist agenda. For instance, they renamed the final competition from "Nationals" to "Championship." The domain name usfirst.org is a relic from the past.
I have been taking my kids (now 2,4 and 6) to the Granite State (New Hampshire) Regional since they were born, and they love it!
I told my 4-year old son that the video was going to be released over the weekend, and he hounded me for days about it! After I downloaded it, he watched it 20 times!
If you haven't been to one you probably wouldn't believe it - but it is truly a spectacle - and interesting for the 1-year-olds as it is for the 38-year-olds! (My 1-year old daughter [last year] was literally on the edge of her seat [my lap] fascinated with the game-play!).
As much of a "theatrical" even as it is - you're not just sitting in one place the whole time. You are free to enter and roam the "pits" where the teams work on and test their robots, etc.
I highly recommend all to check out your regional finals, around late February, and early March!
No it's not. May be the first time they've done a competition of this caliber though. I volunteered at the regional middle school competition this year, and it's been going for four plus years.