FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, March 8th, 2009

On March 6th and 7th I was able to experience a FIRST Robotics Competition hands on for the first time! Our team, 229 Division by Zero, competed at the Finger Lakes Regional (FLR) competition in Rochester, NY at RIT.

It was interesting. Since I didn’t really know what to expect, I didn’t have many assigned responsibilities other than to figure out what I wanted to do. There are two main options of things you can do when you are a team mentor:
1) Scouting
2) Helping out in the pit

Scouting is recording all of the statistics of human players on different teams. You have to sit up in the stands with all of your fellow scouters, and record the data. I tried this once and had to bail, I find it hard enough to focus on one robot at a time, let alone count the flying moon rocks from a human player AND see if they go in or not.

Helping out in the pit is mainly what I did. If there was a nut that came loose but couldn’t be reached, I’d help fix it. Programming errors, electrical problems. That sort of stuff. When we got into the elimination round, I helped check to see what battery is most full, and bring it back to the playing field. I must say, I think we were the most well-equipped team with batteries!

It was a great competition! I enjoyed the elimination round very much. We made it to semi-finals, which is quite an achievement! We’re sponsored by the university’s SPEED program, and I’m pretty sure we don’t have any other sponsors. There are some teams out there who are sponsored by NASA!

My main concern though was that it didn’t really feel like a robotics competition, but more or less like a RC car competition. I expect a robotics competition to have AI, and to actually have robotics involved. For this competition, all the parts were machined precisely, and everything was planned out. It just did not feel like a competition of robots.

I was expecting more autonomous, which would make it feel more like a robotics competition. The fact that most of the excitement stemmed from the human players and not the “robots” also enervated me. No one really ‘cared’ about how well the robot was designed. In fact, during the gameplay, it wasn’t really the robots that scored most of the points, it was the human players. How ironic is that?

Maybe it was just a poor game this year. The whole smooth surfaces thing was somewhat cheesy, in my opinion.

I had one notable problem there. I didn’t bring safety glasses, so I always borrowed from the table set up at the entrance to the pits. However, there was one shift where it was not an ordinary person lending out the glasses.

This lady denied me safety glasses!

Yes, this is true! Denied safety glasses! Can there possibly anything more stupid than that? There was a box full with safety glasses! I totally felt like reaching over the table and strangling her, but I didn’t. Instead, I ‘explained’ to her that I always borrowed glasses from here. Eventually the conversation became so ridiculous that I just went in the pit with no safety glasses on. The end of this all was that I ended up borrowing glasses from someone on the team.

My first FIRST competition, and I’m denied safety glasses. Not the best impression… shame on them.

I also was not very enthused how FIRST mentioned the economy and lots of other political mumbo-jumbo in their opening ceremony, and… well, basically during the entire competition.

However, it was fun. It was different. I enjoyed it! Our next competition is in Annapolis, Maryland. Hopefully we will pull off a victory!

Posted in: Projects, School.
Tags: 229, autonomous, Division by Zero, FIRST, FLR, not-robotics, RIT, Rochester, Safety Glasses

2 Responses to “FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009”

1. Thom Blake Says:
   March 16th, 2009 at 1:26 PM

   I agree about the competition seeming silly. When I heard about a robotics competition I was interested, but when I saw video I just turned it off.

2. RobotGrrl.com » Blog Archive » FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009 - Photos Says:
   March 28th, 2009 at 12:12 PM

   [...] per my previous post, there was most definitely more than just words to this entire [...]

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