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What you should know about the FIRST Robotics Competition!

Last Friday I had the honor of attending the FIRST Robotics Competition and was graciously granted access to the behind-the-scenes activities. It is an amazing program celebrating its 20th anniversary and has touched a great number of brilliant minds. I’m excited to share what I learned.

Twenty years ago Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway (and a whole lot of other really cool stuff) realized that the United States, enjoying the riches of generations of hard work, had failed to build programs that captivate and motivate our youth in ways aside from striving to become entertainment celebrities and/or sports heroes. While both are incredible occupations, neither significantly contributes to U.S. knowledge capital. You know, the brains that made us rich in the first place? As an attempt to solve this situation, he created the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Organization and launched the FIRST Robotics Competition. Inquiring minds will want to know that Dean’s father designed the original identity system and it’s still being used today.

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an international high school robotics competition organized by FIRST. Each year, teams of high school students compete to build robots weighing up to 120 pounds that can complete a task, which changes every year. In 2010, the 19th year of competition, 1,808 high school teams with roughly 45,000 students from Brazil, Canada, The Netherlands, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mexico were involved.[3] In 2011, there will be an estimated 2,080 teams participating.

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 operate autonomously as well as when guided by wireless controls, to accomplish the game’s tasks.[4]

As I toured the “pit” (the area where the crews prepare, maintain, and repair their robots) I had the opportunity to meet some really amazing people. I met an electrical engineer from Arkansas who is employed by Baxter Pharmaceuticals and donating his time, resources, and mentor-ship to the program and teens. This was a very consistent theme. I was overwhelmed by the amount of good will and support within this community. Competitors like to think of themselves as “frenemies.” The tech they were bringing to the competition was nothing to sniff at either. I was impressed by the level of technical sophistication and engineering applied to the competing robots (vision-based autonomous task completion anyone??).

Competition is fierce. I found the focus on a competitive edge akin to something I’d imagine at a NASCAR event (F1 for our European readers). There was a deep understanding of the rules and the opportunities afforded by them. Teams were passionate for the win and the celebrity (mostly within the community) afforded the winners.

Stewardship was also a big deal. The image below is of the team that graciously lent me one of their own (Jack) as a tour guide. In this photo they are all frantically preparing for the next round of competition. I’ll pretend the blur is caused by their pace and not my lacking photographic skills.  

Here is a video of an early bracket (like The Final Four) competition. BombSquad (one of the Baxter funded robots) is dominating this round and wins by a very nice margin.

So what about us? Are we ready to start Olympic Robotics Competitions? We’ve seen robotic death matches on popular television for nearly a decade now and the “nerd” continues to build status (Bill Gates poster child) within our culture. Dean Kamen, during a VIP luncheon spoke about the “tipping point” of this program and it’s acceptance within our culture.

He believes that point is very near and I couldn’t agree more. I’m inspired by Dean and his dedication to this program (20 years!!) and I am proud to say that Tanagram will be getting involved in next year’s competitions. We’ll keep you posted as that develops.

Here is the competition schedule for 2011 with the Championship Games happening at the end of April.

Good luck to everyone!

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on March 29, 2011

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