FIRST Robotics Competition
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The FIRST Robotics Competition is a high school robotics competition organized by FIRST. As of 2006, over 1,125 high school teams of 28,000 students from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more compete to build 100-125 pound robots that can complete a task that changes every year. Teams are given a standard set of parts and the game details at the beginning of January and are given six weeks to construct a competitive robot that can accomplish the game's task. Teams compete in 33 regional competitions over several weeks in March to try and qualify for the championship event in Atlanta, Georgia in April. Previous years' championships have been held in Houston, Texas and at the Epcot Center near Disney World.[1]
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[edit] Competition concept
The FIRST Robotics Competition involves teams of mentors (corporate employees, teachers, or college students) and high school students who collaborate to design and build a robot in six weeks. This robot is designed to play a game, which is designed by FIRST and changes from year to year. This game is announced at a nationally simulcast kickoff event in January. Regional competitions take place around the United States as well as in Canada and Israel, but FIRST has a multinational following that further includes the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, and Germany.
Teams are expected to solicit local businesses for support in the form of donations of time, money, or skills. Some teams have membership of 60 or more and have established substantial presence in their local communities by helping local FIRST Lego League teams (see below), running classes in various technical topics, and more.
As of 2006, FIRST includes more than 1,100 teams (around 20,000 students) competing in 33 Regional Competitions, as well as one championship competition held in Atlanta, Georgia.
Although FIRST encourages teams to compete robustly against one another for numerous awards and success in the arena, the organization bestows its highest honor, the Chairman's Award, on teams that best exemplify the FIRST ethos of "gracious professionalism". According to the 2004 FIRST Team Manual "...one of the most straightforward interpretations of gracious professionalism is that we learn and compete like crazy, but treat one another with respect and kindness in the process. We try to avoid leaving anyone feeling like they are losers. No chest thumping barbarian tough talk, but no sticky sweet platitudes either. Knowledge, pride and empathy comfortably blended..." FIRST teams tend to take this paradigm to heart, and, as many observers have noted, even during the fiercest of competitions rivals can often be seen complimenting or offering technical assistance to each other. In order to win the Chairman's Award, teams are expected to apply "gracious professionalism" outside the competition by participating in community service activities which further FIRST's mission of changing student's perspectives about science and technology.
FIRST is not just about building a good robot. The intense working conditions and hard-earned wins build families out of teams, and an important part of the competition is to ensure that good work ethic and gracious professionalism prevail through all of its facets. In fact, of the awards handed out at regionals and the championship, the most important ones are not concerned with the robots, but with who spread the message of FIRST and impacted their community to the most effect. Safety, website design, animation skills, and even team imagery are all applauded with their own forms of recognition.
[edit] Competition details
The competition is a yearly event. The most intense participation occurs between the months of January and April, but "mini-competitions" are hosted by many teams in school gymnasiums throughout the year. In early January, FIRST announces the details of a game to all participating teams. The game changes very much from year to year, with only a few rules such as the size of the robot staying the same.
For the next six weeks, often called the "build season," the teams begin to design a robot to play the game, essentially from scratch. This period's intensity makes FIRST the program what it is, and gives it personality. Team members spend the time designing strategies to play the game, drawing up ideas for robot parts, working with size and weight constraints, and finally, building and assembling their robot. Often, mistakes are discovered late into the build season, and teams must start over close to the beginning. Other challenges include gaining driver experience, building the electronics for the robot, and programming it. After the build season has ended (usually the 3rd full week of February), teams must ship their robot to where their first competition is.
Competitions for FIRST consist of 33 regional competitions, and one championship event. Regionals typically involve between 20 - 65 teams. Teams are randomly paired into qualification matches, where they are ranked. Matches are relatively short, and only involve 4-6 robots (depending on the game). The game changes every year, but for the most part, they involve some autonomous (computer controlled) robot operation for 10-15 seconds at the beginning of a match, followed by a much longer period (usually 2 minutes) of remote control. Teams use scoring objects on the field to get points, which are evaluated only after the match has completely ended. In between matches, teams spend the time desperately trying to fix broken parts, and sometimes even add new ones right at competition. After the qualification matches have ended, the top 8 "seeded" teams will pick partners from the remaining ones, and the resulting alliances will compete for a regional winner.
The Championship Event is held every year towards the end of April, often in a large stadium or convention center in the South-Eastern United States. The championship event consists of 4 divisions of 85-95 teams competition on one of 4 fields: (clockwise from the Einstein Field of the 2005/2006 Atlanta Georgiadome field layout) Galileo, Newton, Archimedes and Curie. The teams compete for the Division Championship title essentially the same way they would compete for Regional Champion. The division champions then bring their robots over to the Einstein Field to compete in an elimination tournament to determine the National Champion.
[edit] Previous Competitions
- 2006: Aim High
- 2005: Triple Play
- 2004: FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar
- 2003: Stack Attack
- 2002: Zone Zeal
- 2001: Diabolical Dynamics
- 2000: Co-Opertition FIRST
- 1999: Double Trouble
- 1998: Ladder Logic
- 1997: Torroid Terror
- 1996: Hexagon Havoc
- 1995: Ramp 'n Roll
- 1994: Tower Power
- 1993: Rug Rage
- 1992: Maize Craze
[edit] Build Season
At the beginning of the build season at the kickoff events, teams receive the Kit Of Parts and the game description. The kit of parts is a collection of everything a team needs to make a functioning robot, although teams often buy or create custom parts in order to make more effective game pieces and drivetrains. The kit of parts includes robot controllers, motors, speed controllers, and software such as Autodesk, MPLAB IDE, 3D Studio Max, and much more. As soon as the teams receive the kit of parts, the 6-week build season begins.
Members of teams will typically put as much as 8 hours per day on top of their normal schoolwork to build the robot during the build season, and sometimes 12-16 hours on weekends. Depending on the resources of a team, robots are built anywhere from a professional machine shop by sponsors to a student's garage by students. Often teams will require that in order to attend the competitions, students must keep a log of the time they spend on the robot.
[edit] Competition
A FIRST regional event will typically comprise of one day of practice matches that do not count for points, one and a half days of qualifying rounds where teams play matches with randomly selected alliances, and the elimination rounds where the teams are selected by the top 8 (or 12, at a super-regional) seeds in a manner that varies from year to year. At a competition, there are many tasks to complete beyond simply playing the game: scouting, strategizing, and safety are all off-field elements of the competition that teams take very seriously.
[edit] Scouting
Scouting at a FIRST event is arguably the most important off-field aspect. Scouting involves a team of team members watching matches, trying to catalog the competition so that the team knows what it is up against if they are in a match competing against a given robot. Information recorded depends on the team, but often includes autonomous modes, quality of drivetrain, and various game-dependant parameters. This information is very useful when planning a match with alliance partners. Scouting is also very important in selection for the elimination rounds: If a team has not scouted properly, they may find themselves having to select an alliance for the elimination rounds knowing nothing about the strengths or weaknesses of the robots they select. Simply selecting by the robot placement after the qualifying rounds is not optimal, since most robots have weaknesses, and it is best to select an alliance that minimizes these. For instance, a defensive robot that is poor at scoring would want to select high-scoring alliance partners instead of other defensive robots. Without good scouting, it is impossible to know which robots make for good partners
[edit] Team Organization
Team organization is one of the most important parts of a team. Without good organization, teams find it difficult to raise money and make decisions, which negatively impacts their performance at competitions.
[edit] Build Season Involvement
There is often much debate among members of the FRC about what role the students and adult mentors play in the teams. There is a wide spectrum of levels of involvement, from teams not even having mentors to the mentors actively designing and building the robot with student assistance. These two ends of the mentor-involvement spectrum are discussed below. Note that although there are teams that take a 100% student designed, student built philosophy and are teams that leave design and construction entirely to adult mentors, almost all teams fall somewhere in between.
- Engineer-Centric Teams: Engineer centric teams are teams where the adult mentors from the community are in charge of much of the design and construction process. These teams take the philosophy that since FIRST is about inspiration and glorifying engineering, then the students on the team will be most inspired by seeing real-world engineers build a construct a very competitive robot. This way, the students will see everything that is possible with an engineering education and may be inspired to enter into an engineering field.
- Student-Centric Teams: Student-centered teams take the philosophy that students will learn more about science and engineering by designing and building the robot themselves. Student-centred teams often have very few mentors (possibly not by choice) that play a much more passive role in the design. On these teams, the mentors would allow the students to design and build quite freely, stepping in if they see a potential problem such as an unreliable, expensive, unnecessary, or difficult to fabricate component.
[edit] Criticism
Engineer centred-teams are often criticized by more student-focused teams as having an unfair advantage. Some say that since students do not get to participate as fully in the design and construction phase as they would on a student-focused team, then the students might not fully understand all that is involved, and enter engineering with a false impression of what is involved.
Some people think that, in general, student centric teams perform slightly worse in competition than those with the backing of a strong engineer-centric force, as the teams often have designs that are less competitive than ones where the mentors played a larger role. Especially in their rookie year, teams tend to make design and construction mistakes that reduce their ability to play that year's game. Critics of the fully student-centred paradigm say that students may become discouraged and believe that they aren't cut out to be engineers, thus reducing the inspirational role of the competition. Further, students may not be exposed to a full spectrum of engineering tools or processes.
[edit] Collaboration
Collaboration is relatively new to FIRST. Collaboration between teams where teams share ideas is encouraged by the FIRST ethos of Gracious Professionalism. Collaboration can range from teams sharing the design and fabrication of small parts within their robots to multiple teams building identical robots. Teams that collaborate have widely varying goals: some do it to save costs on fabrication, as building multiple identical parts is faster to do and less expensive for the teams involved than making their own separate parts. Some teams do it as part of their emphasis on spreading the influence of FIRST: Team 1114, already a successful and well-supported team, started two new teams (1503 and 1680) by helping them with their design and fundraising efforts.
[edit] Debate
Since 2004, collaboration on entire robots has ignited a debate in the FIRST community about whether it is fair. Critics of full-robot collaboration say that collaborators are exploiting a loophole in the FIRST rules in order to have one very large team that is allowed to field 3 of its robots simply because they have different team numbers, while competitors may only field a single robot. Critics continue that other teams that feel this way may be discouraged as collaborating teams with large resources enter 2 or 3 powerful robots, potentially bumping weaker teams out of elimination rounds or awards. In defense, supporters of collaboration point out that smaller teams may not have even existed if larger teams had not offered to support them with designs and expertise. Thus, they say, there is a net increase in the number of people being exposed to FIRST. Further, collaboration is contended to be more like the real engineering world where companies or divisions of companies share designs between themselves. The organizers of the FRC have indicated that they would like to encourage collaboration, so it appears that collaboration will be present in the FRC in the future.
[edit] References
- ^ FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST. Retrieved on 2006-06-09.
