Watching a Real Team

You can learn a great deal about FIRST and its competitions by talking to a real team. For example, Dr. Carson Roberts of Frederick Douglas High School is the faculty advisor for that school's team, and talked with me about his experiences with FIRST.

This was Douglas High's first year competing. The school had never built a robot before, so there was a lot to learn in a short period of time. According to Roberts, the teams really only have six weeks to design, build and test the robot. The entire cycle is extremely compressed, and for the Pink Panther team there were many long days (and even some all-nighters) during the six weeks.

A good view of the 2004 playing field

The first order of business was raising money. There's the $5,000 entry fee, which gets you the kit of parts. But then you have to raise all of the remaining money to buy everything else you need. This includes materials for the frame, other motors and actuators, extra electronics and so on. And, don't forget the cost of travel expenses if a team makes it to the final competition. There is a limit set at $20,000 for the total cost of the robot. A typical team, therefore, needs to raise between $10,000 and $30,000 dollars in order to compete.

Douglas High School was able to sign on the Coca-Cola® Company as a primary sponsor, as well as other companies and people from the community. Several companies had engineers who agreed to help the team, and another FIRST team also offered advice and support. One volunteer joined the team through pure serendipity. One of the team's adult volunteers met Bob Bateman, a mechanic at Atlanta Triumph Ducati, while standing in line at Home Depot. Bateman did most of the welding for the team's robot. According to Roberts, "One of the wonderful things about FIRST is the community involvement."

Because this was the team's first time, Roberts decided to focus the team's efforts on just one part of the competition. There really are four skills that a complete robot would have needed to master in order to win the 2004 event:

• The ability to follow a line
• The ability to scoop up balls and pass them to the players
• The ability to cap a goal with a large ball
• The ability to pull up on the pull-up bar

The team decided to build the goal-capping feature first, since that represented the most points.

The starting point for every team is the kit of parts. According to Roberts, it supplies the radio control transmitter and receiver, the on-board robot computer and starting software for it, the main drive wheels, two motors to drive them (the motors come from common electric drills), and assorted other parts. So, on day-one of the project, they started with those parts and a blank sheet of paper...

Competition Timeline One interesting thing about the FIRST competitions is that the whole process is very quick. There's only about 6 weeks for the teams to build their creations. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) publishes a very useful guide that recommends the following plan for the 6-week construction cycle: Week 1 - design the robot Week 2 - design/prototype the robot's subsystems Weeks 3 and 4 - build the subsystems Week 5 - integrate the subsystems to build the robot Week 6 - test and practice This is an extremely intense schedule and pretty much assumes that the team makes no serious mistakes. This compressed schedule is one of the things that makes FIRST challenging. On the other hand, it also prevents procrastination.