Competition 2004

Each year, FIRST announces a new competition in early January. All participating teams get a kit of parts in February, and then have approximately six weeks to design and build their robot to meet the year's challenge. Teams compete in 26 regional contests, and the winners go on to the national competition. The national competition for 2004 was held in Atlanta, Georgia.

The playing field at the start of a match

The annual FIRST challenge is always demanding. Here are the challenges for the past two years to give you an idea of the skill level at which these robots must work:

• Stack Attack (2003) - The playing area measured 54 feet x 24 feet (16.5 meters x 7.3 meters). There was a platform with ramps at the center of the field, with scoring zones at either end of the field. The platform was initially stacked with 29 large plastic storage bins. The robots moved the bins into the designated scoring area, with extra points awarded for bins that were stacked on top of each other.

• Zone Zeal (2002) - The playing area measured 48 feet x 24 feet (14.6 meters x 7.3 meters), with five marked zones approximately 10 feet (3 meters) wide down the length of the field. On the field were three large, moveable goals and 40 soccer balls. Each team tried to place as many soccer balls as possible into one of the goals and move the goal to the proper point on the field.

For 2004, the challenge was called FIRST Frenzy. On each end of the field there were bins containing 18 playground balls. When activated, these bins spilled their balls onto the field. Robots picked up these balls and passed them to human players standing at the outside ends of the field. The human players shot the balls into goals on the field. Robots then needed to cap these goals with large balls, and then move to the center of the field and try to grasp hold of and hang from a 10-foot-high chin-up bar. The entire game lasted only two minutes, so everything happens very quickly. See this video from the NASA archive for a demonstration of a typical game.