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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.
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.
The Vice article said they had 6 months to build their robots. Nope, 6 weeks.
Organization? You must be joking..
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.
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!!!!
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.