Robots Battle In 25th Annual FIRST Competition (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: Saturday marked the conclusion of the 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition, which saw over 20,000 high school students from around the world descend on St. Louis, Missouri... 900 teams pitted their robots against one another in various games... The ultimate robotics test occurred in the championship round, known as the FIRST Stronghold, which involves two alliances composed of three robots each. At each end of a pitch are two towers, representing each alliance's stronghold. The alliances must breach their opponent's stronghold by throwing boulders to goals on the tower to weaken it. There's some embedded videos from the event in Vice's article, which points out that it's the competition's 25th anniversary. (Here's Slashdot's post about the event from 2004). This year 40,000 people attended, including will.i.am and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

Comments

this is where

[turkeydance]

warfare is headed

26th annual first competition

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it be the first if they've held it 25 times before?

Re:26th annual first competition

[parkinglot777]

How can it be the first if they've held it 25 times before?

If you don't know, you should read TFA. Or if you really don't want to do that, you need to think a bit when you see all cap English word in a normal English sentence. The word FIRST is an acronym of "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology."

A lot of hard work....

[BenJeremy]

I started mentoring a team this year in Michigan (my son joined and I kind of got roped in to help their programmers), and they made it into subdivision eliminations at the World Championships. I didn't get to attend (nothing for programming to do at this stage, anyway), but I did get to watch the matches. Our little bot did pretty well, but it always boils down to the alliances - as well as how you match up.

This year they made their way into elimination rounds in every event they participated in and got some valuable experience to carry into next year.

My only issue is the limitations of sensors that are "approved" for use. Gyros and ultrasonics that seem to be mostly useless (at least in our testing), and many approved parts are sold out within hours of the game announcement (this year it was the track modules). We'll have this summer to play around more with the sensors and build a better library of software to use, as well as tweaking one of the other dashboards (why is keeping the camera view on the dashboard such a problem?) so our drivers will get consistent performance during matches.

3238!

[ArylAkamov]

Who former 3238 here?

'Murican values

[matbury]

Good to see the competition is in keeping with 'Murican values. Take a really cool, creative, interesting, and potentially useful area of technology then turn it into a festival of violence.

Re:'Murican values

[h8sg8s]

Violent, how exactly? It's a contest scored on points where ramming gets a penalty.

Re:'Murican values

[BenJeremy]

Well, that's about as clueless a post as I've seen on Slashdot.

This isn't battlebots, and teams from around the world competed in St. Louis for the Championship.

Our team works with many teams over the build season (including a team in China) to assist them, and in the pits, teams are always willing to help other teams in need of parts or other assistance.

The only "combative" nature to this year's game was the element of defense to harass bots from shooting goals into the tower - but overzealous defense can easily draw a flag and award points to the other team.

The key term used in FIRST Robotics is "Gracious Professionalism" - and it is encouraged in every way, from build season to pit awards to the field to our fans.

Re:'Murican values

[Wild_dog!]

Yep. You are right on.
My nephew's team competed and got into the finals where their team's alliance was crushed by a superior alliance.

But they spent the year helping lots of other teams with building and programming their bots.
They were always busy helping others.

And they always made the point of bringing on a much lesser team as a point of principle even when that ended up disqualifying them from their last competition.
Still they had a great run and a great year all the while helping as many as they could along the way.
Memories to last a lifetime!!!!

Re:'Murican values

[anegg]

I suppose that if you focus on the "theme" of the competition (Medieval Siege Warfare) you might come away thinking that it was a festival of violence. However, if you look at the actual game play and functional requirements of the robots, you would see that it is a technically challenging team-oriented game that happens to be played with robots instead of people. It was no more focused on violence than sports such as soccer, baseball, or volleyball. The theme was purely for fun.

The robots had to be able to "cross" various types of defenses; engineering the robots for this part of the challenge required very robust and reliable construction as well as (in some cases) very interesting manipulator capabilities. The robots had to be able to carry a "boulder" (more like a foam rubber ball" over the defenses and into a courtyard, and then the robots had to shoot the boulder into either a low goal or a high goal (more points for the high goal). In the end game, the robots had to be able to "scale" the goal tower (for the most points) by pulling itself up on a horizontal rod, all while not extending any part of the robot more than 15 inches past the perimeter frame of the robot.

The robots are controlled remotely for most of the match (except for a short autonomous period at the start). This means that each robot had a driver/pair of drivers who had to play the game by proxy (through their robot). The best robots typically involve creative use of sensors and programming to optimize the behavior of the robot for scoring (such as automatically lining up shots on the high goals). The robots play in teams of three against three for each match. Aggressive behaviors intended to damage opponents robots are right out and will get a team either fouled or disqualified. As others have pointed out, Battlebots this is not.

I have heard that SKYNET is local service provider

[Trachman]

I have heard that SKYNET is the local internet servicer provider in St. Louis, MO, also providing artificial intelligence services to certain robot teams.

6 weeks, not 6 months to build..

[h8sg8s]

The Vice article said they had 6 months to build their robots. Nope, 6 weeks.

Re:6 weeks, not 6 months to build..

[BenJeremy]

Yes, 6 weeks, because you have no idea what to build until the announcement of the game and rules.

Worse, once you compete in a District Regional event, your bot gets "bagged" and the time you have to work on it and tweak things becomes extremely limited, unless you build a second bot.

We had intended on building a second chassis, but didn't get it done. If we get the tweaks I'd like to see done over summer for the fall demo matches, and they work well, I'm going to use that as a reason to push our mechanical and electrical teams to get a copy built for next year's game; that allows us more time to drive and test.

Too little time to really do much with the software this season, for us. We had one student who knew Java going in (wasn't taught in school, but a class is scheduled for next year), and last year's code was basically "do exactly what LabView does, but in Java" so this was the first year we tried to do some new things. I hope that we have a decent library of code, and more students who can code in Java. We also have to convince electrical and mechanical that the camera can be used for more than something for the driver to glance at.

Re:6 weeks, not 6 months to build..

[Anonymous Coward]

As a father of a child who's been participating in the FIRST for a few years now (my daughter's team has won many awards in regional, and has been consistently going to the championship, including this year), I have to say that 6-weeks limit is an excellent idea, as otherwise, the kids would spend even more hours on the robots than they already do. As an engineer myself, I love that kids get to build the robot, but I also know that their normal education is also important, and beyond certain amount, there clearly is an impact on the school work, so there being some line on the sand of how much you can spend time on is immensely useful.

These are not the robots you are looking for

[wwalker]

So, they are not actually robots, but basically remote controlled contraptions? As in, they are not completely autonomous, but remotely driven by humans? Why are they called "robots"?

Re:These are not the robots you are looking for

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an autonomous part of the match and a driver-controlled part. FYI, the robots driving around Mars are not fully autonomous, either.

Re:These are not the robots you are looking for

[swell]

"remote controlled contraptions"

Built by parents of high school children (presumably boys). May the best parent win! This is as bad as the Olympics which once consisted of amateur athletes and now is full time professionals. When sports and high school activities are dominated by dishonest participants, how can we expect government or businesses to behave differently?

Re:These are not the robots you are looking for

[anegg]

The word "robots," to roboticists, means a much wider range of devices than the popular conception of a robot. Pure autonomous activity is not a requirement for something to considered a robot or a robotic device; nor is mobility for that matter.

As someone else already pointed out, the FIRST robot games (FIRST LEGO League, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition) all include autonomous activity as part of the game. For FLL (upper elementary school and junior high school), it *is* the whole game - no remote control is used (but robots can be retrieved from the field during game play by the "operators" at the cost of a penalty, and the environment is highly simplified). For FTC and FRC, the autonomous period is only part of the game, and it's the smaller part at present. However, all of the robotic elements for autonomous action are present in the robots - sensors, actuators, on-board controller, on-board power - and the current limit on how much of the robot's activity is autonomous and/or automated assistance to the operators is the knowledge and ability of the high school (FRC, FTC) and junior high school (FTC) designers, builders, programmers. Given the level of resources and time needed to create totally autonomous robots capable of complex activity, I'm more than willing to cut the students some slack and not rain on their parade telling them "they didn't *really* build a robot" because its not totally self-directed. Anyone who wants to rise up to the challenge of helping build a totally autonomous robot can start by finding a nearby high school or junior high school with a FIRST program and offering their time as a mentor to the student team members. If your local schools don't have a FIRST program - start one. http://www.firstinspires.org/

By volunteering as a mentor, you will get the chance to work with real robots being built to solve challenges that are closely related to real world needs, using equipment that costs anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars (at no cost to you other than your time), where the imagination and ingenuity of the students and mentors get put into concrete form and tested out in full-on competition.

Disclaimer: I'm a FIRST volunteer.

Re:These are not the robots you are looking for

[h8sg8s]

The amount of parent/mentor involvement varies from team to team. Some (like my son's) were student built and programmed with parents and mentors basically providing funding, food and advice as to how to keep fingers attached to hands and eyes intact while using power tools. While visiting the pit area in St Louis, I did notice several teams where parents/mentors exclusively worked on 'bots while students stood by looking bored. This, thankfully, was the exception. This is a chance for students to see how tech teams work (and don't) and is about as close to reality as you can get, complete with funding challenges, personality issues, tight schedules and competition. It rocks.

Re:These are not the robots you are looking for

[bensch128]

I volunteered at the FRC at SJSU and the best team there had an auto aim and fire system for shooting into the top targets. Their bot almost always got the ball in.

I was really impressed with the teams there and the kids competitiveness and drive. All of them wanted to win and had put in a huge amount of time and effort into their robots.

It was a pretty awesome event and volunteering was a blast.

Re:I have heard that SKYNET is local service provi

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard that SKYNET is the local internet servicer provider in St. Louis, MO

That would actually be a massive improvement over our current choices of ISPs.

Robots???

[Anonymous Coward]

If those devices are remote controlled by humans, THEY ARE NOT ROBOTS any more than that model airplane your friend flies on weekends.

Robots ?

[Archfeld]

Robots or remote controlled devices ? There is a huge difference. While I'd applaud a school system promoting either as educational, I've never seen a true robotic competition at a level below super elite college.

Re:Robots ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first 15 seconds of each match is completely autonomous. The best robot I saw at FRC used thoise 15 seconds to run an ostacle (points) position itself for a shot, locate top portal with auto-aiming sensor, shoot boulder (points) run over another obstacle (more points) locate and capture boulder on floor, run back over obstacle (more points) shoot boulder and make it (still more points). 15 seconds. Saw this repeat about 8 times through the matches, and they didn't even make the top score.