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Robotics Education Hardware Science

BEST Robotics Competition Kicks Off Challenge 2004 56

Posted by timothy from the move-some-bits-around dept.
His Eminence writes "The Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology (BEST) robotics competition has formally unveiled its 2004 challenge, dubbed 'BEST FEVER':'Alas, poor Squeaky has been feeling under the weather. Squeaky has a severe case of BEST FEVER. His system must be treated radically. Only gene therapy can cure him, his DNA must be repaired.' Teams have already started designing and building their 'unique' robot for this challenge."
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BEST Robotics Competition Kicks Off Challenge 2004 More

BEST Robotics Competition Kicks Off Challenge 2004

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  • DNA? (Score:2)

    by mfh ( 56 )
    Well if he has DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid [wikipedia.org]), then he really does have a problem. I mean... he's a robot, right?

  • what? (Score:5, Informative)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @09:53AM (#10549876)
    "The idea for a BEST competition originated several years ago when two Texas Instruments engineers, Ted Mahler and Steve Marum, were serving as guides for Engineering Day at their company site in Sherman. Together with a group of high school students, they watched a video of freshmen building a robot in Woody Flowers' class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The high school students were so interested that Ted and Steve said, "Why don't we do this?""

    Um, they've been living in a cave for ten years and never saw "FIRST" and just came up with "BEST"?

    • I agree, seems like BEST is a rippoff of FIRST robotics (Go 639!). Although the involvement with biology (PCR ) is very interesting to me, since I'm thinking about being a plant genetics major. I wish FIRST would incorperate things from fields other than engineering in the game.
      • Go 1038!

        FIRST incorporates computer animation too (I led the team that won a regional animation award two years ago) but it's definitely a side event that really has nothing to do with the rest of the competition. There's also a lot of PR involved that actually does affect the competition (hoping that some really good team will pick you to be their partner in the finals). Still, the more fields they can incorporate, the more people can become a part of FIRST. :-)
      • (go 174!) Is this a joke? Cause it is so close to FIRST it just seems like it, and I have never heard of this before.

    • Re:what? (Score:3, Informative)

      by rmohr02 ( 208447 )
      It appears [bestinc.org] "BEST" and "FIRST" have been around for roughly the same amount of time, but I hadn't heard of "BEST" until now either.

    • Re:what? (Score:3, Informative)

      by LauraScudder ( 670475 )
      The biggest difference between FIRST and BEST (and the reason my high school did BEST instead of FIRST) is corporate sponsorship. Every team that we knew who did FIRST ended up not really designing their robots because their sponsors were so invested in having a winning robot that they had their engineers do most of the design work. BEST has no sponsorship - in fact, you're only allowed to use parts from a short list - and so the students end up actually doing the design work.

      • Re:what? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Coolpup ( 796096 )
        I disagree. I led Team 292 PantherTech to 3 Regional wins and a division win at Nationals in 2003. I graduated from the same high school a year before and came back to lead the team. We didn't have a single engineer to help us. The whole robot design, strategy, and practices were designed and ran by students. Some of the bigger teams that have loads of money and tons of engineers with very complex robots were helpless to stop us. (Only a battery problem and another awesome robot (Team 25) was able to
        • Notice that I said most teams I knew. I know that there are good teams out there who build everything and do really well, but that doesn't change the fact that FIRST is an expensive competition that schools need to round up the money for. BEST requires absolutely no investment from the school or recruitment of outside funds. They hand you the parts. So you avoid the problem of overbearing sponsors entirely. That's the main appeal of BEST over FIRST.

      • Every team that we knew who did FIRST ended up not really designing their robots because their sponsors were so invested in having a winning robot that they had their engineers do most of the design work.

        Many FIRST teams are like this, yes, but not all. The Ohio State University mentors three FIRST teams, and on each the students do about as much of the design work as the mentors do. Oh, and we hold our own against the corporate-sponsored teams.

        In short, it depends on who your sponsor is.

        • Many FIRST teams are like this, yes, but not all. The Ohio State University mentors three FIRST teams, and on each the students do about as much of the design work as the mentors do.

          Indeed, as a two-time coach of team 95 (Lebanon High School), I know of at least one team that does their own design and fabrication (albeit with a lot of guidance and oversight from coaches). Programming, too (having had to teach two different teams about basic PID-controller theory).

          On the other hand, I've seen plenty of

      • FIRST ended up not really designing their robots because their sponsors were so invested in having a winning robot that they had their engineers do most of the design work.

        I was in FIRST and I think that is not always true, although we did see a lot of it (or just assumed) at the competitions. Engineers designed nothing on our robot. Everything was done in our shop execpt for sandblasting the robot's frame and a donated sign by a printing company. Everything else was done entirely by the students and teac

      • It really does depend on who your sponsor is. I wish the team I help mentor on HAD a sponsor. The kids work to provide the money to power the team. And as someone noted - FIRST is expensive.

        There have been a lot of efforts to knock off a FIRST program at lower cost. Canada had one for quite a while, but BEST is the most organized and largest knock off.

        And the comment about watching a video from Woodie Flowers MIT class as the inspiration for BEST is really cheeky. Woodie is the National Advisor for FI

    • Re:what? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My highschool has been doing BEST almost since it started. The difference is that to participate in FIRST, you have to shell out huge amounts of dough. BEST is completely free.
  • ... I hope they do not become this [homestarrunner.com] after robots manipulating their dna...
  • I competed in BEST last year and after winning first place at Capitol BEST (Austin Area), my team went to Texas BEST(Tri-State Competition) and we recieved 5th place in the competition. This is year I was not on the team because my coach left and the new group was not very appealling to me, anyways I know from one of my friends that the Capitol BEST competition happened yesterday and that the BEST topic had been announced 6 weeks ago. The only thing new now is that teams are begging to qualify for the "national" level competitions. Anyways after saying that now it is time for my ranting on the competition. First of all the electronics in the kit which each team is provided are very basic, ony have one four channel controller, 3 servos, 2 large motors and 2 small motors. These electronics often fail, at unexpected time and the judges at the contest almost always blame your soldering skills and robot setup until the try the equipment on something else and realized it sucks. The most annoying part is that the controller is in now way programmable to even receive complex commands you have two joysticks and to get the robot to use both wheels while turning you have to make the controls for the wheels on the diagonal axises of the auto centering stick and use the other stick to control the motors. The robots come nowhere near autonomous and they engineering aspect which is stressed so highly by the competition is really just learning to deal with faulty equipment and hold your temper while talking to dumbasses.

  • I was a mentor (Score:2, Informative)

    by Janitha ( 817744 )
    The BEST Robotics competetions are rather simple, yet it teaches many things. I did it for the four years in high school. Good stuff. I went to the Texas Brazos Competetions yesterday, which the team I was mentoring won 1st place.

    Check out their site at http://www.tiger-robotics.org/ [tiger-robotics.org]

    or the middle school's site http://csms-robotics.dyndns.org/ [dyndns.org]

    I think their not bad for website coded by hand by high school and middle school students.
  • Im in a best team and were going to state and our robot only mangaed to get 6 points on our own. But we had good documataion on the part of the competition called the book so were going to state.

    (im in the sa best division and my team is the Taft G-nomes state to us is Texas Best)
    http://taftbest.org/ [taftbest.org]
    http://sabest.org/ [sabest.org]
    http://www.texasbest.org/ [texasbest.org]
  • Yeah, Capitol BEST [capitol-best.org] competition was just this Saturday. The topic and rules were announced 6-weeks ago.
    I was part of the ill-equipped Westwood team [capitol-best.org]

    As you might assume, we got owned, but we did have the coolest design.
  • The DNA theme is pretty thin. There are no real laboratory robotics in the competition. Instead, Roche is leveraging the BEST competition to help distribute their genetics educational CD (linked from the BEST homepage). I suppose it IS a good way to distribute a positive spin on gene testing (don't get me wrong, I am FOR the technology), but why not take advantage of a real need. Laboratory automation is full of robotics and I am sure young minds could contribute to the development of better systems.

    Hey Ro
  • I admit... the challenge is corny... But you have to look deeper at the actual competition and tech behind it all...

  • Someone stop me (Score:3, Funny)

    by BlueTooth ( 102363 ) on Sunday October 17, 2004 @01:10PM (#10550719) Homepage
    They may be BEST [bestinc.org] but they're not FIRST [usfirst.org]

  • BEST v. FIRST (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Tuva ( 787959 )
    As a current BEST team member (4th and final year sadly) BEST revolves little around "real" science. They just use it to base a story off of. BEST is awesome because unlike FIRST, there is no cost teams. I know in Dallas BEST Texas Instruments pays for it. Other places, I don't know who pays. BEST gives you a box of parts, and says have fun, complete this task, and you have 6 weeks. It gives you awesome experience. You learn the applications of building things, not just theory. (such as the limit switc
  • "Guess what! I got a (BEST) FEVER! And the only prescription, is more (BEST) COWBELL!"
  • http://nikg43.sourceforge.net/best/ [sourceforge.net]

    I helped some friends build their bot. Ours was special because we used the printer as the body/frame. It was their first year their school was competing, so it was all new to us. We didn't have a reverse but it did have zero turning radius. I don't think we won anything but it was still fun.

    It had a griping arm to pick up the balls since they were worth the most points. It really couldn't do anything else.
    • We got 13th place out of 26 if I remember correctly. I also remember putting a piezo buzzer on it just so it would beep when you moved the arm because it was cool.
  • I was part of the William Fremd team 2001-2003. We kicked so much booty its not funny.
  • Anyway, I think the challenge is kind of corney. Robots don't have DNA. Under that, though, the actual engineering challenge is kind of cool. You can only use a VERY limited set of parts. Designing a robot out of plywood, cardboard, and duct tape is not that easy*.

    As for the challenge, the challenges have always been silly (RAD to the Core was an exception). I think this is to get younger kids (11-13) interested and exicted. The older kids look over the "fix Squeaky's DNA" bit and look at it as a chance to
  • the teams can design a robot to repair the DNA of an exploded webserver?

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