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Robotics Education Science Technology

FIRST Robotics Championship Underway 124

Posted by timothy from the pull-up-an-eyeball dept.
Bob Moretti writes "The annual FIRST robotics championship is underway at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. 295 of the best high school teams from North America and beyond have brought close to 20,000 students. 130 pound, 5 foot tall robots compete for pride and national recognition. NASA is providing a webcast. An explanation of the somewhat complicated rules can be found here. Any event that puts science and engineering in the spotlight for thousands of high school kids, many of them from low income or inner city areas, is a must-see. <shameless promotion> My team is currently in 20th place in the Galileo division. </shameless promotion>"
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FIRST Robotics Championship Underway More

FIRST Robotics Championship Underway

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  • FIRST post (Score:5, Informative)

    by r_glen ( 679664 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @11:53AM (#8891682)
    How about a link that works [usfirst.org]

  • Robots compete? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @11:57AM (#8891693)
    130 pound, 5 foot tall robots compete for pride and national recognition.

    The robots do what they do because some nice person has placed a wire up their ass, unless this is an advanced AI contest.

    • Re:Robots compete? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Farrell ( 564771 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:11PM (#8891762) Homepage
      The first 10 seconds of a match are purely autonomous. Then, the rest of it is remote controlled. And a lot DOES have to do with the robot, as certein teams are VERY good at what they do. My team(the Wheeler High School Circuit Runners http://www.circuitrunners.com) have a 100% accuracy for getting on the bar, and our shooter has a 96% accuracy for making the shots. It's a very fun competition, you should really watch it. Go Circuit Runners!
      • Actually, it's the first fifteen seconds that are autonomous. Trust me...I'm the programmer for 818. I know this one. :)
      • Man, I'm jealous. I go to Sprayberry a few miles away and our most technical course is "Build the school webpage while being screamed at not to use a text editor rather than frontpage," IE, "Gifted Computer Programming" and you guys get robots? =P
      • Autonomous Mode is the first 15 seconds, not the first 10.

  • Just goes to show... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @11:58AM (#8891698) Homepage
    The robocup (real football/socer) people use 23cm diameter max robots. The american football people use 5 foot robots.

    Bet the american football robots still insist on wearing body armour. Bunch of old women :o)
    • Nah, it's closer to basketball than football. And when you gotta pick up balls around 23cm and carry them, or get up onto a 10' high bar, being 23' doesn't exactly work.

  • A FIRST Lego league, too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BigHungryJoe ( 737554 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:02PM (#8891714) Homepage
    I think the Lego league [usfirst.org] sounds fun.

    MINDSTORMS have become really hard to find. Do any retail outlets still carry them, or are we just left with the Lego website?

  • WEsttown (Score:3, Informative)

    by jakers ( 555396 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:07PM (#8891743) Homepage
    My School, WEttown School, a large Private school in East PA is there too. They are the team that one the "Best Rookie Team" Award at the Anapolis Reagionals and placed 15th there too! WE are all really syked about their success.

    • Re:WEsttown (Score:3, Funny)

      by Aardpig ( 622459 )

      My School, WEttown School, a large Private school in East PA is there too. They are the team that one the "Best Rookie Team" Award at the Anapolis Reagionals and placed 15th there too! WE are all really syked about their success.

      A Special Needs school, then?

    • Re:WEsttown (Score:3, Funny)

      by Farrell ( 564771 )
      My team is local to Georgia, we placed 1st at our regionals and got the Chairman award. We also got the Rookie award last year. In 2 years, we've received 6 awards. ^.^ We're gonna come out on top today. Which division are you in?
    • My team (Albany High and RPI) is also at the National Competition. We took the Rookie All Star award at the New England Regionals. We're on the Galileo field, but I must say we're not doing too well. Congrats to everyone that made it there.
      For those that don't know, the matches are 2 minutes long, with the first 15 seconds autonomous. The next 1:45 primarily involves the robot pushing robots to the shooter on the team, which are shot into either a moveable or stationary goal for 5 points each, or latching o
    • Yeah... Except with a lowercase E.

      We did a better job at drexel, seeding at 9th place. We actually won the "Judges Award" at Anapolis, not the "Best Rookie Team" (which I don't think exists anyway.) At Drexel, we won the "Best Seeded Rookie Team", and the "Rookie All Star."

      Here in Atlanta, we were in the Newton division. We seeded 21st.

      - Sharp

  • Let's be honest (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:09PM (#8891755)
    The most successful candidates, the most experienced candidates, are fundamentally driven by the simple, throbbing desire to eventually succeed in building a real girl (or at least an interim jerk-off-bot) a la Weird Science.

  • Someone had to say it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:11PM (#8891764)

    I for one welcome our teenage robot building overlords!

    Er, wait....that would be truly frightening. Robot-building teenager overlords! Yeah, that's it.

  • USFirst is a Scam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:11PM (#8891768)
    Sure many of the teams are from 'inner city' schools but the competetiveness of team has nothing to do with the students and everything to do with corporate sponsorship.
    I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts.
    When we got to the tournament (we all paid our own travel and lodging) we found out the student built robots are an extreme exception. Most literally are built at the labs of GM or NASA or who ever is the sponsor, the engineers do everything, and the students have no clue. This is encouraged. A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance
    USFirst is a joke in terms of education, it's just a big PR opportunity.

    • Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance

      Not true at all. Last year, my team, 212, had no corporate sponsorship, no engineers, no nothing: we built our robot in our school's machine shop with help from parents. Students had to pay their own food and lodging. None of that takes away from all of the knowledge, experience, teamwork, and of course, gracious professionalism that you learn from competing.

      And oh yea, as for standing no chace...we won first place at the Central

    • USFirst is a Scam - Depends on School/Sponsor (Score:5, Informative)

      by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:48PM (#8891999) Homepage
      Sadly, there's a lot of truth to this.

      I've been involved on the periphery of a not-so-local high school's (Rick Hansen Secondary School - Team 1241 "Force 6") development project and I'm disappointed in the extremely high cost of entry (ie to be registered and to get a kit), the sophistication of the projects as well as the other costs associated with it. It is essentially impossible to field a team for less than $35k CAN ($25k+ USD) to be successful. This includes money for the kits as well as travel expenses and, amazingly enough, promotional materials that are needed to ask for sponsorship funds.

      The high cost of entry really bars schools from low-income inner city neighborhoods, which are the ones that would probably benefit the most from the experience. These schools also do not have contacts/parents in industry that could help as mentors and sponsors. This is probably the biggest issue I have with USFIRST right now.

      The robot task is such that high school kids cannot work through them without substantial help from experienced engineers and what the kinds get out of the program (as well as put into it) depends primarily on how the sponsor engineers allow the kids to do. The best sponsors are high level advisors and make sure the kids plan out the designs themselves and help them think through the problems that they encounter rather than do the design themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the kids are barely able to play around with the robots before the competition because of the amount of time the sponsors put into the robots.

      There is too much emphasis on the necessary fund raising. The Rick Hansen team had created a promotional DVD along with glossy brochures; there is an irony that these materials can be produced quite cheaply because they give the impression that the team has more money than they know what to do with.

      Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).

      There should also be a restriction on how much the sponsors can do - clearly there are a lot of teams that benefit from corporate tool rooms with trained tool makers and do not rely on industrial arts rooms with the students learning how to machine parts on their own. To help enforce this, I believe that each team, to qualify must provide documentation on the robot to prove that the students were primarily responsible for the design and this documentation could be made available by USFIRST as guides for later teams.

      Regardless of the warts, USFIRST is the best opportunity kids have to learn, design and compete with others. The events are amazing, fun and energetic experiences that are barely controlled chaos. The kids have a lot of fun, FIRST is a great way to build school spirit and it gives a few kids an opportunity to see if engineering/computer science is the way they want to go in life.

      myke

      • If the Rick Hansen SS you speak of is the Rick Hansen SS I'm thinking about, did your team participate in the 2003 Canada FIRST Robotic Games?

        Just to inform/add a little shameless self-promotion of my own, last year marked the final year that the Canada FIRST robotic games were played. I was on the team for 3 years (2001-2003), so I just wanted to chime in.

        I'm not sure how US FIRST handles things, but the biggest problems with Canada FIRST wasn't that people helped too much, it was that no one (not even

      • Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).

        That was sort of what was done this year. The kits still cost the same amount, b

        • I think you are overreacting to a legitimate goal.

          Obviously the goal is less about how to get on first base and more about stealing second. Or in other words - what to do WITH a robotic platform - assuming you have a working platform as a given.

          Whether you like this or not - a lot of useful applications for robots will be invented by people with this kind of experience - and lacking the detailed understanding of how to put a platform together in the first place.

          In reality the application of robotics is t
    • My high school is in West Allentown (pop. 105,000) and our robot the only thing that wasn't done by students was we had someone else sandblast the frame. Everything else was all designed by students and teachers. We actually did very successfuly, 1st place in Virginia, 2nd in Philly, and made it to the playoffs at the championships. We did get a NASA sponsership (along mostly local small businesses) but I don't think we once talked with someone from NASA, they just give out money to teams that apply for i

    • Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:3, Informative)

      by jpellino ( 202698 )
      Hardly a scam - there's a continuum of how teams arrange things - and spread the work among students, teachers, parents, engineers. Our first year was probably 1/4 each - with the slight hobble that to actually work in the corporate sponsor's machine shop - you had to be 18 for liability reasons. So we came up with a solution - certain fabs got done in the shop, the rest of it at school. Parents brought in tools, jigs, supplies, the kids designed with straws and pins if they had to (ironically, that was
      • I think your comment about "fanning the fire" is dead on. One of our students was a football player with scholarships waiting in the wings and all that, until he blew out his knee. He came to a team meeting last year (before I joined but I've gotten to know alot of the students since I joined) and decided to persue engineering as a career. And this kid is sharp. A bit of a jokester but quite bright. It will be good to have him in the engineering field.

        And as an indirect response to the grandparent, the amo

    • Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:2, Informative)

      by AWhistler ( 597388 )
      Did you go out looking for sponsors? Did you learn anything from the engineers that helped you? Did you have any engineers helping you? How much building did YOU actually do?

      FIRST isn't about students building a robot. If you want to do that, go build one for Robot Wars or BattleBots. If you don't want to build a robot, look into the Odyssey of the Mind [odysseyofthemind.com] competition.

      FIRST is about marketing your team to get sponsorship. It's about getting community involvement in order to find engineers to help y
      • By the way, I'm watching the NASA-TV coverage of this event. There are at least three teams who attended the Chesapeake regional that I recognize that have made it to at least the quarter finals of the championships. As of right now (2:06PM eastern), one is in the semifinals.
    • It's going to vary a lot from school to school as other posters have shown. Certainly there is a certain cost associated with the initial kit, but parts are reusable to some degree. Certainly though, I don't think anyone expects schools alone to sponser the costs, and with all things, parents are expected to step in and help with the costs and such. Regardless of who wins or loses, the entire thing is meant to be an educational program, and certainly those students who do not do any machine work, or any d
    • I will only agree with you to one extent. Our team has been building our own robots for three years now. This year we have made it to the finals in our regional competition. The only part the students did not completely make was the robot's transmission, which was made by one of our mentors. Other than that, it was six weeks of staying up til 10 o'clock, planning, designing, building. Don't underestimate the abilities of a young group of people with too much free time on their hands ;)

    • Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kaboom13 ( 235759 ) <kaboom108@@@bellsouth...net> on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:13PM (#8892153)
      Your full of shit. I was in FIRST for 4 years. Our Sponsor was Motorola (Team 108 - the SigmaC@Ts if you must know). We built our robot side by side with the engineers. Solely engineer built robots are the extreme exception, as are solely student built robots. The whole idea is you work with and learn from professionals. Teams whose students had nothing to do with their bot are not encouraged, they are reviled, and it is easy to tell when you talk to the team members (as a driver for two years, I've had plenty of opportunities to talk to other teams). You picked NASA as an example, which shows your ignorance. NASA has a grant program where they pay the entry fees for you and thats it. You can only qualify for two years, then your on your own. Most of the teams you saw with Nasa on them were probably rookies. It sounds to me like you tried it once, and when you got beaten by the veteran teams, got bitter and didnt come back. US FIRST is a great education oppourtunity, by the time I graduated I was teaching the engineers things about how to build a robot. Also, although it didnt in 1997, the national competition now has qualifications to attend it. You now must win a regional or regional award, earn a "bye" based on last year's performance to qualify for nationals, or be a rookie team to get in to nationals. It's also worth noting that if the companies just wanted the PR opportunity, theres lots of places they could spend it and get a lot more (PR-wise) for their very large sums of money. Also the engineers and other staff at these companies use their own, unpaid time to work with the teams. Also, student run student built teams can be competitive, bit don't expect to do it in 1 year, against teams that have been around since the program started. finally, some other FIRST related links the story should have mentioned.

      Soap 108 [soap108.com]
      A website run by my team that records and digitizes every match for every competition we attend. Go here for video from matches of a real competition.

      Chief Delphi forums [chiefdelphi.com]
      The most popular FIRST related message board, and a good place to learn about the attitudes of the students involved.

      • Re:USFirst is a Scam (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dduardo ( 592868 )
        I was on team 108 as well, but from my experience the engineers practically did everything. I was on the electrical team my last year and I had almost zero interaction with the actual electronics on the robot. Motorola was also very unsupportive in terms of the animation. I don't know if you remember but a couple years back the animation team got pissed off at motorola and bashed them in the credits.

        Soap was probable the most student oriented task, but I don't find it fun sitting in front of a computer dur
    • You're oh so wrong...

      I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts.

      That's changed. Now, you've got to either (a) win a competition or (b) win one of a select few awards to qualify. That doesn't give FIRST 300 teams, though, so you can also qualify based on how long it's been since your team has las

    • USFirst has become quite sad. If a team doesn't have money, they can't do squat. I'm not talking just not being able to build a robot that doesn't break after some well-engineered (pun inteneded) robot smashes into it and breaks it, but all the other stuff that FIRST claims to be about: learning from engineers, getting out into the community, all that other crap, you can't do without money. We couldn't even get engineers this year, so our robot was entirely student built, and we actually got penalized for
    • I was involved with FIRST in high school, a couple years after the whole thing starter. At the time, we were sponsored/partnered with a Renssealer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The year I participated, my classmates had very little involvement - it was really our teacher's, and the RPI class's project. The bulk of the work was done at RPI, a 20-minute drive away. Many of us didn't have our own transportation, had after school jobs, etc. so it was very hard for the high school students to be active partic
    • How is it a scam? From day one, Dean Kamen has said that the main goal of FIRST is to inspire students in science and technology. It's not a program that is set up for students to do everything. And FIRST is not responsible for how a team is run. I've been a volunteer on team 116 for over 3 years now. Team 116's main claim to fame is that it is one of the few teams that gets a large grant from NASA and the use of one of their engineers (a lot of other teams get smaller grants to help them get started).
    • Money smooths the road to FIRST, true. It's certainly nice to be able to afford whatever parts are necessary--and since my team got our NASA sponsorship this year only after the fund-raising was underway, I know about the luxury of not having to beg. Also, I freely admit that there are team members who don't touch the robot, ever, preferring to do administrative or PR jobs. However. I must strenuously disagree with your perception of FIRST. The engineers helping us lent their time and expertise to the
    • On our team, there is NO corporate sponsorship. All of the mentors are from college, and we work closely with the kids. There are no professional engineers in it. And the kids have learned a LOT about engineering. They help with designs and run the machine shop.... This is not at all what you are talking about. Oh, and at our regional of 30 teams, only 6 went on to nationals. It had nothing to do with paying and everything to do with winning. And we qualified for nationals, and went, with a bot built and de

  • Sorta like BEST, only cooler. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My high school participates in BEST [bestinc.org] (specifically, the San Antonio [sabest.org] hub), which seems to be similar-- except FIRST actually seems to involve some programming (BEST robots are basically controlled not unlike how an RC car would be controlled).

    Nonetheless, these programs are a great way to teach hands-on engineering to students.

  • 1304: My Highschool (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IcarusMoth ( 631872 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:31PM (#8891885)
    NOLA center for sci math, a Rookie school pulled a top half ranking (23 of 46) as a rookie school. Go fighting Nautali! wh00t!
    about a month ago I was visiting during spring break. I was one of the founding members of the robotics club... except back then we called it RobiticA, and it was less of a robotics club per se and more of an excuse to cut class and play with electric motors, hydrolics and Legoes. in communist russia your sig posts you.
  • I know I define a successful robot build on how well it does in Robot Wars. All of these other tests seem, well, pointless. When you pit 2 robots against eachother in a battle to the death, that's the true test. Survival of the fittest defines strong humans, why not robots?
    • Well, the problem with Robot Wars (the brittish version that is, the american [don't remember it's name] just simply sucks: they barly even touch each other!) is that the robot that wins isn't the one with the most weapons, but the one that is too fast and is too well armoured for anyone to be able to touch him that wins, because the other always breaks down... But as I'm writing this, I understand your point. That IS the definition of a good robot. But to make sure that I simply will not just agree with yo
    • When your testing how well a robot can destroy another robot, a battle to the death is the answer. When you want robots to do soemthing usefull, how well they can fight is pointless. It's like saying we should pick the best ice-skater based on which one of them does the best at boxing.

  • FIRST (Score:4, Informative)

    by Neward Rylet ( 634838 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:38PM (#8891931)
    Definately a cool program. I was involved in it 2 years ago, my team (643) won the Virginia regional and got 2nd in the Philadelphia regional. We also were in the championship tournament at Disney. For about all of January and Feburary (each year's challange is released near the turn of the year) the team worked on designing and building the robot and soliciting funds for hours each day. The championship was great, the school even gave us spending money and FIRST gave us vouchers for meals and tickets to the park. They even rented out Epcot for one night (and they took up half the parking lot for the whole week). Of course Dean Kamen was their with his Segway. It was certainly a great experiance and well worth it. Despite pressure from the school Administration and students, the tech. teachers didn't do it this year or last year, it was too much of a time commitment and they have families (I doubt their wives would have let them).
  • Is this something like the Robocup Junior on a national level?

  • Yea! GO FIRST! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TLouden ( 677335 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @12:50PM (#8892012)
    This is pretty cool that the Slashdot crowd follows this too. The Patribots just joined this year as a last minute team and we got 21 of 43 at the Colorado regional. Being one of 18 rooky teams it was quite the accomplishment along with getting the rooky inspiration award.

  • angry black man (Score:4, Informative)

    by Angry Black Man ( 533969 ) <vverysmartman@ho[ ]il.com ['tma' in gap]> on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:12PM (#8892145) Homepage
    My school competed in this last year...

    We are an inner-city public school. We had no sponsor, couldn't cough up the $20000 entry fee (or whatever it was), and made our robot for under $200. They waived the entry for our aptly titled "ghetto bot". When wer got there, the number of student built robots were slim to none. Most realyl are built by the engineers that sponsored the school.

    We didnt get last though, so i guess thats good.

    • Re:angry black man (Score:3, Informative)

      by Strokke ( 772031 )
      I was a member of 1047 (Nerdlingers). We finished 4th out of 20 rookie teams at our competition last year despite having 0 help on our robot by any adults, although we are the exception. We went to a local team to use their facilities (they had built a mock arena), because we didn't have enough money. When we got there, all their kids were dicking around and playing tag, and about 5 engineers (mainly NASA) were doing all the work on the robots. This is not an isolated example because in the process of s

  • How First Works (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 17, 2004 @01:27PM (#8892222)
    1. The robots are not autonomous. They're little more than big RC cars. No AI, no computer vision, frankly little computer stuff at all. If you're student interested in CS, this competition has little to offer you.

    2. The cost is daunting. A typical budget for a FIRST team is about $15K. This basically means that FIRST is a competition only for kids from affluent suburban high schools. If you're an inner-city school, unless you're lucky enough to get a grant, you're not good enough for this competition.

    3. FIRST often arranges for grants by teaming schools with corporate sponsors. The sponsors provide in-kind cash and some mentoring. But my experience is that sponsors, being corporations, rationally want to make sure that their "donations" maximize their own visibility, and so when the kids' efforts go south, the corporations wind up doing much, even most, of the work on the robots, particularly in inner-city or otherwise disadvantaged schools with less resources. In some cases kids have been reduced to being, more or less, the joystick operators.

    4. FIRST doesn't play ball nicely with other, frankly rather better, competitions. For example, BotBall (www.kipr.org) has been around for a long time, and kids have a month or two to build an autonomous robot to solve a complex task using lego. Thus this incorporates EE, CS, and ME aspects of robotics. The cost of materials is usually about $1K. Recognizing that their $15K entry made FIRST only available for the Mercedes Benz class schools, they looked to BotBall for some inspiration and decided to ... make their *own* "LegoLeague". Basically a heavily dumbed-down version of BotBall. So rather than work with BotBall, they're trying to run them out of business it looks to me.

    I do not get a good feeling about FIRST in the least.
    • To 1: But http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/education/robot_builder/ prog/programming.htm shows some code you need, so are these robots then semi-autonomous or how do you mean?
    • Although I cannot agree with what you said about FIRST as I have never participated in FIRST or FIRST Lego League. However, I have heard some bad things about FIRST and I have seriously looked into FLL. I was not impressed.

      I run an after school robotics club at my middle school with around 40-45 student members. We meet nearly everyday after school and even during the summer. I teach the students to program in C and try to teach good engineering practices. We participate in Botball.

      Botball is an abso
    • You should probably do a little bit more research before you post, considering how offbase you are. In response to: 1) The first 15 seconds of every match the operators do absolutely nothing, the robots are run with a C++ program (upgraded from BASIC used last year). 2) It has nothing to do with the school, nor how inner-city it is considering ever school has a sponsor, this can be Fairchild Semiconductor (my sponsor when I was a student), LEGO, or even the 100+ teams that NASA sponsors. 3) Some sponsor

  • Lotsa /.ers (Score:2, Informative)

    by CoolQ ( 31072 )
    Wow... This article provides great evidence how many /.ers are teenagers :)
    My rookie team [comclub.org] placed 15th out of 52 teams in the Granite State Regional. We were a student team, with a couple of mechanical engineers who volunteered their time but not much money. We even beat our mentors!
    </plug type="shameless">

  • First Tests Engineering Know-How.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Inhibit ( 105449 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:14PM (#8892495) Homepage Journal
    and challenges the students involved to build the robots in a limited time enviroment (something like 8 weeks) for competition. No replacements are allowed, iirc, and only reworking can be done on site.

    This'd directly refute the poster above, that thinks they're completely built by sponsors. I covered the Connecticut competition [pcburn.com] at the invitation of a systems operator involved with the event. It looked to me like most of the robots were well constructed home-brew with a competent technician helping the students along, shop teacher style.

    Seems to me from being there and looking at the robots that there wouldn't be a huge advantage from designing them in a lab environment. The tasks are more geared toward creative design than sheer money thrown at them.
    • Well, one comment I must say in response to this...my school participated this year, and the teacher that ran the robotics club at our school that participated in this came back and told us how for some schools, there were professional engineers ON SITE with some of the schools, doing the reworking. Now, perhaps this isn't THAT widespread, I don't know, but I think this is something else you need to keep in mind.

  • Check out Chiefdelphi.com (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nevek ( 196925 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:15PM (#8892499) Homepage
    I'm a member of a Southwestern ontario robotics team.

    our budget is rarly more than 6500$, 5000$ of that goes to our entry fee.

    In the past 3 years we have competed against 50-75 teams at our toronto regional.

    We have placed 8th,6th, and 4th.

    Seeing the amazing machines that GM, Delphi, and NASA are able to make is breathtaking, our team consists of 2 Teachers, 2 engineers and aroun 15 students. We consistantly outplace teams with 20k+ funding and engineer driven..

    This just shoes that determined thinking and commitment to a project can push us past our obsticles.

    • Our small town has roughly 30,000 people... we lack large corporations to sponsor us, yet we were fortunate in the last few years to gain funding from a large university. Our team consists of 24 high school students, 3 engineers, 1 teacher, 2 adult volunteers, and 4 college mentors. Our budget is nowhere close to those of the high end teams, yet we've done well each year. We've won a regional (seeded 2) and we've also gotten finalist in addition to a few design awards in the last 4 years. FIRST is expensive
    • We have placed 8th,6th, and 4th.

      Just a correction Kev, we placed 8th in 2002, 5th in 2003, and 4th this year in 2004.

      I do agree with your points, teams don't need lots of cash in order to compete with the big teams, although it helps. All you need is a strong driving platform and good ideas of how to do the various tasks.

      I think that we were in a unique situation, being sponsored by an an automotive parts supplier [siemensvdo.com] and local greenhouses.

      Check us out Team #773- The Kingsville Kukes [kingsvillekukes.com]

  • Disturbing (Score:5, Informative)

    by kirisu ( 145274 ) on Saturday April 17, 2004 @02:55PM (#8892739)
    It is rather disturbing how many people are bashing the program. It is a good chance for students to learn about many things they otherwise wouldn't in high school. The students on the team I help mentor (1243 out of Swartz Creek, MI) did all the pnuematics and all the electrical systems. We also have students learning how to program in C, doing all the autonomous code and writing code to handle inputs from the various controls. All the mentors did was explain to them how the systems worked, they hooked it up, they figured out problems, and they built the robot.

    We are a rookie team this year, took first at the Grand Rapids regional, and are currently competing at the championship (17th place in the Curie division, currently). Sadly, I am not there.
    • This is great, but your team is the exception. Most of the winning robots are built by the engineers who work for the sponsors, not by the students. And if you don't have a filthy rich sponsor, you're at a disadvantage right out of the gate. My high school team was sponsored by a local machine shop. We were competing against teams sponsored by Raytheon and GE. Even if the students on the other teams had done most of the work on the robots by themselves (which it was glaringly obvious they hadn't), they
  • I was the lead programmer for our team, 1240 [lhsrobots.com], and I had a really great time participating in the Midwest Regional Competition. We ended up getting third to last (we were under manned and under budgeted), but it isn't about winning.

    What was so cool about this whole thing was, if you needed help with your robot, there were literally 2 or 3 teams coming to help you, because teammate selections were random it was to your best interest that everyone's robot worked! Everyone there was so nice and easy to talk
  • My team [krunch79.com] seeded 4th and made it to the regional semi-finals.

    We had a good event even if we didn't win. Was kind of disappointing to not even get an honorable mention for the Chairman's Award though. (For those that don't know, the Chairman's Award is the highest award at any FIRST competition) We had a good last match, and we're proud of what we accomplished.

    Congratulations to any mentors (or even students) who's team participated in the competition. This being my rookie year, it's much more involved then

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