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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the hail-the-new-robot-overlords dept.

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.

2 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. A lot of hard work.... by BenJeremy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. 6 weeks, not 6 months to build.. by h8sg8s · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --
    Organization? You must be joking..