Robots Battle In 25th Annual FIRST Competition (vice.com) 26
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.
this is where (Score:2)
26th annual first competition (Score:1)
How can it be the first if they've held it 25 times before?
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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.... (Score:5, 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.
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Violent, how exactly? It's a contest scored on points where ramming gets a penalty.
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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
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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
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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 abl
I have heard that SKYNET is local service provider (Score:2)
I have heard that SKYNET is the local internet servicer provider in St. Louis, MO, also providing artificial intelligence services to certain robot teams.
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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.
6 weeks, not 6 months to build.. (Score:4, Informative)
The Vice article said they had 6 months to build their robots. Nope, 6 weeks.
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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
These are not the robots you are looking for (Score:2)
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"?
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There is an autonomous part of the match and a driver-controlled part. FYI, the robots driving around Mars are not fully autonomous, either.
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"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?
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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 ho
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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 g
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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.
Robots ? (Score:2)
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.