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Topic starter
2023-07-05 9:14 am
I've joined my local chapter as a mentor for FIRST robotics competition. We already did a summer camp where the in-coming freshmen built, wired and programmed a robot chassis in one week. They were able to drive it around RC style by the end of the week. For the competition, we expect to have a significant autonomous ability using vision, recognition and self control. All that will likely be handled in Python.
I couldn't tell if the robots were remote controlled or not or if they made any autonomous moves?
I couldn't find any links where they explained how the robots were built and so on just the competition itself.
No details on the construction of these machines. They all looked similar?
2023-07-05 10:42 am
I couldn't tell if the robots were remote controlled or not or if they made any autonomous moves?
I couldn't find any links where they explained how the robots were built and so on just the competition itself.No details on the construction of these machines. They all looked similar?
I'm just getting on-board myself. But from what I learned during the week 😉
- FIRST started in 1989 which shocked me. I had never heard of them. Here are more details about the orgizaton around the world https://www.firstinspires.org/about/at-a-glance
- There are some significant restrictions to size (cube dimensions) and weight ~120 lbs I believe. They have to use certain hardware and its not Arduino, RaspPi or PC's.
- The parts are quite expensive and there are members of a group that are do fund raising, having an Internet presence and make CGI videos. They're trying to include others besides robot developers.
- Although the teams can meet year round, and they can build, try things and learn skills. They have a different challenge every year - 2021 (video above) was the hoops and climbing challenge, 2022 was moving cones and block onto shelves. They get the year's new challenge in January and they have 8 weeks to design and build their bot. They are supposedly not allowed to have any pre-built parts, but they can disassemble and reassemble say... the chassis on the start date.
Getting Started - https://docs.wpilib.org/en/2022/docs/zero-to-robot/introduction.html
Autonomy - There is an initial portion of the "race" that must be done autonomously. New teams struggle to achieve any significant scoring in this time, but well established teams are quite advanced with autonomy. There is also a phase that must be done by RC. I believe this is mainly to level the playing field so the advanced teams don't destroy the beginners totally. However, they are allowed to have supplemental autonomy. For instance...
Some of the "Hoop" bots had vision systems for self aiming, range finding and ballistic calculating autonomy to fire the balls automatically at the hoop as they arrive in the hopper. The RC operator merely had to run over the balls to scoop them up. Some even had color detection systems to shoot their own color balls at the hoop and shoot the opponent's balls away so the driver could just scoop up everything and the bot would sort them out. You see some of the heat videos (hundreds) you'll see some teams having RC aim and shoot. Others, it's like a machine gun with three or four balls being shot and in the air at the same time.
Our team is the 6932nd to be formed and is I think has been around for six or seven years. We have never made it to the World Finals, but we seem to have gotten better every year. This is my first year mentoring.
3 lines of code = InqPortal = Complete IoT, App, Web Server w/ GUI Admin Client, WiFi Manager, Drag & Drop File Manager, OTA, Performance Metrics, Web Socket Comms, Easy App API, All running on ESP8266...
Even usable on ESP-01S - Quickest Start Guide
robotBuilder and thephilnewman reacted
Topic starter
2023-07-05 10:52 pm
So expensive priority hardware modules. Do they also use priority software to use the hardware?
Do they use ROS?