Episode: 610
Title: HPR0610: First Robotics Competition
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0610/hpr0610.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:51:18

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Hi, this is Jared. I'm going to give a talk about the first robotics competition.
First is an organization that's acronym stands for for inspiration and recognition of science and technology.
The FRC first robotics competition pairs high school students with professionals, engineers, designers, scientists, programmers, plus teachers.
We work side by side for six weeks to design and build a robot from scratch.
Every year the competition is brand new. There's different rules for the robot, different rules for the game.
Each game is usually a short two-minute game, multiple scoring possibilities.
Recently the games have been played with two alliances, a red alliance and a blue alliance. Each alliance made up of three different teams.
Each team is a corporate sponsored high school or a group of high schools.
In the first program though the robotics competition is really a gimmick. The idea is to promote technical professionals as rock stars or athletes.
In the first community the three main rock stars are Dean Cayman, Woody Flowers and Dave Levery. Dean Cayman you know from developing things like the Segway,
the Segway two-wheatle self-balancing scooter, the Luke prosthetic arm. Recently he's come up with an ultra water purifier and originally back in the 90s he developed a portable insulin pump.
Woody Flowers you may have seen on a scientific American PBS show. He was a host of that for a few years. He's a professor at MIT.
Dave Levery is a guy from NASA where he has the awesome title of director of planetary exploration.
The competition every year has very tight constraints. The rules for the robot, the rules for the game including scoring and penalties.
And it's a short very intense schedule. Six weeks everyone learns the rules and begins at the same time at the kickoff event.
Everybody must box up and ship their robot out by the same deadline six and a half weeks later.
Everybody every team has limited budget to spend on the actual robot with limitations on the total cost plus limitations on the cost for individual components.
And then it's very difficult. You're constrained time-wise to balance the time you spend in meetings during a construction versus real life demands.
Mentors have work obligations. Students have school obligations.
Exams the construction season is January to mid February so everybody who has winter weather has those considerations of plenty of times when teams are shut out of facilities because of winter weather.
It's also flu season. Always have to deal with things like that plus other family obligations that come up.
There's also the balance individual teams have to deal with versus in terms of what we call or refer to as the science fair versus the NASCAR.
So on the science fair side of things you have the kids doing everything and on the NASCAR side of things the mentors do everything and the kids just drive.
When the kids do everything that's fairly limited, high school students just have a limited amount of knowledge and experience and can only build things so far.
So teams might feel good about themselves that students are making all the decisions but it's very limited to what they can and can't do.
Where on the NASCAR side of things and the adults do everything there's always a sort of underlying question, well what are the kids actually learning?
So most teams are in the middle of that and very where they fall in that scale year-to-year, sometimes day-to-day depending on who's there.
More kids than mentor help, kids do a lot of the work and when it's a strong mentor day, kids are more on the learning side of things.
And since the game and a robot is game rules and a robot rules are new each year, there's tends to be a good balance between veteran teams and rookie teams.
So experience can be an advantage in anticipating problems but solving them really can be on a level playing field.
The competition itself to me always seems like a combination of a dance party and a pep rally and a bunch of short fast boxing match rounds.
Matches go very very fast most of the time in recent history they've been two less than two and a half minutes long for each one and you compete in multiple matches over the course of a competition but they go very fast.
There's regional competitions all around the country in all through month of March and into April and then the championship event this year is in St. Louis at the end of April.
There's really two themes of first the terms that they use are cooperation and gracious professionalism with the idea of being that you opponent in one match,
your opponent in one match may end up being your ally later on so you want to play hard but you want to help each other out and you don't want to destroy the other team you want to beat them soundly.
And games are matches are really fun only when you have good opponents and then the other part of gracious professionalism is that you always want to do things that would make your grandmother proud.
In the competition there's qualification rounds that go a day and a half so usually you get about six to eight maybe more opportunities to play a match over that day and a half of qualification and the alliances are randomly selected so the three teams that make up the red alliance and the three teams that make up the blue alliance are put together randomly.
The teams will try to meet with each other to form strategies for a match although usually that falls apart because the opponent doesn't always cooperate with the strategy you've put out.
But most teams have groups of kids scouting their opponents and teams that might end up being their future allies and especially recently there's a lot more effort that goes into this.
Teams are scrutinizing other competitors a lot more anyway wins and losses determine rank but within the rank they have a system of qualification points which is based on the losing alliances score so when you win it doesn't help but it actually hurts if you go out and crush them 100 to one instead you want to win 100 to 99.
And then after qualification they have an elimination tournament so they seed the eight highest ranked teams in order of their ranking and they pick alliance members so there's a little bit of the scouting data comes into that performance there's always some politics that falls in that too.
But in the elimination tournament there's with three with eight alliances of three teams each 25 teams that go into the elimination tournament usually the best of three advances to the next round so eight teams drop down to four four teams play to two and then those final two teams and you end up with the regional winner.
In the elimination tournament the key thing is that the games are turned around very very fast sometimes you have just minutes in between playing matches where during qualification you might have an hour so robots have to be built very robust and the team has to be very well organized in order to handle that.
At the end of each day during a competition they hand out or hand out awards but only four of these awards are based on how you actually doing the competition they award the highest seed they also award the highest rookie seed they reward award the winner of the competition as well as the finalist the second place.
And then there's another dozen or so awards that they hand out some are based on the robots so they have design awards awards recognizing outstanding construction creativity sportsmanship during the competition whether it's during actual matches or helping each other out in between matches teams that should be able to do that.
There's no safety considerations there's competitions for the teams websites and then the top prizes again have very little to do with the competition itself they recognize the team's efforts in community outreach and spreading the message of the first organization.
They are just as important if not more important than winning matches the judges who handle these awards are professionals or retired professionals the matches are controlled by referees logistics are handled by volunteers there's a group of technicians from the first organization who actually run the technical side of the competition the field management system.
And everything else along with the field staff and then there's also regional first employees who help sort of pull everything together at competitions usually in the morning or sometimes after lunch there's VIP speakers and each of the awards also recognizes corporate sponsorship that help put everything together and pay for everything.
The first organization is a is a nonprofit so everything that they get is through corporate sponsorship each team group of high school or group of high schools is usually sponsored by companies whether they're international large companies or small local companies or other local organizations that charitable organizations plus parents and then any fundraising that they do.
Teams are usually involved in community service projects that provide role models for kids in younger grades and there are some other first run competitions for junior high and younger students to and lots of times the high school students are role models and involved in those there's also tons of scholarship money that
first participants high school kids can get from engineering or science or tech based schools schools realize that kids that come out of a first program have an incredible amount of experience and companies will contribute to that to contribute to supporting teams because they realize that after four years of college they're going to have top recruits coming out of school you know with just an incredible experience.
So it's really one of those the thing that I love about it is it's an after school program but it answers lots of those questions that high school kids will ask you know so this is this is what math is for or physics or programming or expository writing or shop class you can apply all that stuff in an after school program like this.
So when you ask one of my ever going to use this in real life here's here's the answer to that and also I think opens kids eyes so when you look around at all the stuff that's around you you start to realize that I was all designed and manufactured by someone.
And in fact if you take in a step further everything that was manufactured the process of manufacturing the stuff was designed and developed the first robotics competition started back in 1992 with just a handful of schools now there's thousands of teams across America Canada Central and South America teams Europe teams in Israel there's competitions.
In Israel and nowadays I'll provide links to notes on previous games videos and there's a lot if you search for first robotics on YouTube you'll see tons of stuff there my own personal involvement.
Back in 2000 I was living outside of Philadelphia and one of my college roommates was living in Massachusetts and he had joined the team he was working for compact which got bought by Intel and he joined the team that they were sponsoring and we had talked a little bit about the design process during their construction season
and turned out that there's the first competition that they were going to was in was in Philadelphia at Drexel University so I took some time off to work and went down there that was their rookie year and they had a they struggled during construction season they actually shipped their robot incomplete unassembled and had no time to test it.
So I went down there and while I was helping assemble the robot that was the first time I actually met everybody on the team they ended up doing very well that year they ended up ranked high enough to pick partners
and then I finally smartened up and found a team near me.
When I joined was in their second year initially it was just one high school and they were sponsored by Motorola since then we've grown to two high school sometimes three depending on other kids that join.
We have multiple sponsors we have now have a solid core of really experienced mentors and a reasonably good number of students that come out each year plus returning alumni that are now in college that are local or spend their time when they're back on winter break helping us out which is outstanding for us in our program.
The Philadelphia area itself is strong there are some outstanding programs in this area teams that have one national recognition for the programs that they have.
So in this area both the number of schools that are participating in the level of competition at the Philadelphia regional competition or the New Jersey there are other teams other strong teams who actually travel to this area for the competition.
I'll put some links in the show notes to help find competitions or teams that are near you every regional competition can always use volunteer and most teams will welcome new mentors.
If you're tech minded whether you know electrical or mechanical engineer programmer IT stuff or just a designer you know I have no training in any of this stuff I'm biochemistry majoring work as a cell biologist at a biotech company.
What do I know about building robots although we've used that in the past as sort of a recruiting tool so well if I can figure it out you guys can figure it out.
But anyway most teams will really welcome new new mentors and new help there's always something that has to be done may not be the glamorous job at the beginning but it's definitely worth the time to spend in it.
And I'll tell you it's easier to join in the fall or even in December than it is in January and February once the construction season kicks off in early January teams are off to the races and it's difficult to learn the whole community while you're also trying to design and build robots.
And for those of you that are already on teams it definitely wish you good luck as construction season comes around and into the competitions in the spring.
So I'll put together some shows later on a little more specifics about the construction some of the different components that we get to build the robots you know the rules they go along with that but the components the electrical platforms.
And the fundamentals that work behind that some of the software and the field management system I think is absolutely fascinating and even the design process that we go through whether we're going to have a specific robot or we're going to have one that does something really well or try to try to do it all.
And I can talk about some of the the various games that have happened in the past like I said each each year the game is different so there are some fairly common things that have been carried along for the past few years but year to year you never know what's going on and talking about some of the processes that we go through during the construction season I think is fascinating and is always loads of fun.
Anyway if you have any questions contact information will be in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
Thank you.
Thank you.
