Robotics after FRC
 

I am realizing that I only have one more year that I can be a student on a FRC team. I know that I could come back as a mentor after I graduate, but what other robotics competitions are there that are NOT like battle bots but are more like the FIRST competitions?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Well, this will be the second year of the C.A.R.D. level robotics for colleges. You can find more information about the program here.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I'm participating on a Lunabotics team for a competition NASA holds every year, I've also been a part of the robotics club on campus and made a Wall-E, and also helped out the solar car team some. Feel free to spread what you've learned in FIRST, don't just stay in the safe bubble.

http://http://www.nasa.gov/offices/e...unabotics.html

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

NASA's Lunabotics competition http://www.nasa.gov/offices/educatio...unabotics.html.

There are also the IEEE competitions, SAE's Collegiate Design Series (5 competitions of various types), and all sorts of OTHER engineering competitions. Bear in mind that most of them are full academic year-long competitions.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Wow! That looks very interesting. Thank you! Is that the only college level robotics competition?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

That sounds awesome! Thanks for sharing!

That's even BETTER! Imagine FIRST....for a WHOLE (academic) YEAR!

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

This is a bit off topic, but I recommend against mentoring FRC during your freshman year, and very strongly recommend against ever mentoring a team that you were a student on.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Ill throw out a good word for formula SAE. Its not robotics but its quite an intense engineering challenge that feels a lot like FIRST.

http://students.sae.org/competitions/formulaseries/

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

why so?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

i understand the whole not mentoring as a freshman, but why not the team you were a student on? One of our mentors is the team captain from 2001, and she does great!

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I think that if you wait 4 years to go back to your high school team you will be fine. After 4 years all the kids you knew on the team as peers will be gone and you can assert yourself as an adult and mentor easier.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

You land lovers...

Build a robot that flies. (MIT puts on a competition, not sure what it's called)
Build a robot that swims. (NURC)
Or build a robot that does both. Hah.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

ATV bot? I'm digging it.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I half agree. Mentoring the team you were a part of is bad for many reasons.
I mentored this year in a different state than my hometown team (as a freshman in college) and felt very satisfied. It definitely takes a shift in mentality, but it can be done.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

What are those reasons?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

If you go straight from being a senior on a team to being a mentor on that same team the next year it is difficult. The reason it is difficult is because you have now gone from a peer working with the students to their mentor and they are now your "subordinate". The relationship is completely different and it can be hard for both the new mentor and the current students to be seen in a truly authoritative position. You might have been the team captain as a senior in high school but that isn't the same as being a mentor and being in charge.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

swimming robots? sounds like a challenge. i heard and read about it a lot before kick-off this year, but what are the chances of FIRST actually throwing a water game at us? it would definiatly be a surprise. Has there been any tries at getting FIRST to start a water or air division?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

That you are not exposed to different attitudes, methodologies, or management styles. Also, you will be viewed as a student still.

I've been on a few different teams and had the chance to watch numerous others, I've always learned new methods for running teams or mentoring from them. Why deprive yourself of the opportunity to learn from another set of mentors and share your experiences with a group that otherwise wouldn't?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

There are some individuals that successfully mentor the team they were on as a student, but I've seen it fail much more often.

The issue is that you have to make the distinction between first-year mentor and 5th-year senior. They are wildly different roles: You aren't there to make a robot, you are there to help the students. This transition is always difficult. Staying with the same team makes it even more difficult, as everyone still sees you in your old position. Again, some individuals are mature enough to overcome this, but they are a very small minority.

Your first year as a mentor is like your first year as a student. You are suddenly thrust into a situation that requires new skills and new viewpoints, and it is frankly overwhelming to watch the seniors navigate the list of responsibilities. Experience as a student helps, but the skills learned as a student are a small subset of the skills to be learned as a mentor. I knew how to tune PID loops, but it took me 8 years to learn how to guide a brilliant but shy student into someone who can tune a PID loop under a competition stress environment.



I mentored a team as a freshman, and in retrospect I personally wasn't prepared for it. I could handle the engineering just fine. What I couldn't handle was the classroom management, the student growth management, the lesson planning and adaptation.

I was fortunate to get my butt kicked at Olin. My professors were very talented in finding the things I needed to improve and bringing a harsh spotlight onto my flaws. They were some very hard lessons, but I couldn't be an effective mentor without them.


TL;DR: Wait a year or two and then join a team with an experienced mentor group. Its a heck of a trip.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

was it easy for you to mentor other teams? is it possible to mentor more than one FRC team during the same season? or is that something i should not even think about?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Swimming robots are a lot of fun, we've been competing in NURC since it's beginning. There are other underwater competitions, such as the RobuSub autonomous underwater vehicle one in San Diego, and MATE which is open to high school and college teams.

Water could possibly be a component of a future FRC game, but the odds are slim. We often play FRC games on top of wood basketball courts...they don't like water.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I have been a part of the IGVC team on campus. The competition is the Intelligent Ground Vehicle competition. Teams build and program autonomous robots to compete in several competitions. Most of the focus of the competition is on the effective use of sensors and programming but at least our team takes the mechanical design aspect just as seriously. Check it out http://www.igvc.org/.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

It is possible to mentor more than one team in a season but I would not suggest it for a college student.

One of our Mentors this year is splitting his time between our team and a rookie team 3974, which is based out of his highschool alma mater. I think he has done a great job balancing both teams, but I also think it has been alot of extra work for him this season. He actually walks around wearing two shirts at competitions and switches shirts depending on which team is in a match :D

~Hannah

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

ah. see i go to a career center that has a team (team 2252) and i have heard that my home school Vermilion, might start a FRC team. i have been thinking about still being an active member of the mavericks my senior year, but part mentor the possible rookie team. has any one successfully tried this as a student?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

During college I don't recommend it at all. I did it out of several teams needing programming support. It was a source of stress and nearly resulted in me leaving FIRST. It also negatively impacted my grades (which is biting me in the butt when looking for graduate schools).


As for now, (I'm a full time engineer) I do think it is doable, I am an active mentor on 79 and available for consultation on numerous other teams across the country (via phone/email/IM/skype) because some of my good friends are part of the teams. I've also been trying to work with some of the rookie teams in my area to ensure that they have a running robot come competition. I also mentor an FTC team.

However, I have to caution against this level of involvement. I'm heavily involved because I am fortunate enough to have a very flexible job and no family in the area. Most of my friends in this area are heavily involved as well (I moved to Florida from Michigan about 8 months ago and am not terribly social outside of FRC). Basically the stars aligned and allowed me to be incredibly heavily involved this year. I have decided I need to scale back my involvement a little next year. I'm working on setting it up so it is easier to remotely mentor teams (79 is over an hour drive from my house) and I am hoping to spread the workload around to some of the other software engineering mentors on 79.

Look, I can't tell you not to mentor teams, it has helped me grow as a person and as an engineer. It is a great experience.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I think we've gotten off onto two different tracks here.

On the topic of mentoring in college, I would suggest that we use http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=47004 which is still at least sporadically active and covers all of the reasons in this thread and a few others besides.


On the topic of engineering competitions in college (note that I did not say robotics competitions, and I'll go into why), there are quite a few. I know that at my school, I can think of 16 off the top of my head, and those are teams, some of whom change competitions. 16 separate teams, covering everything from on the water (concrete canoe) to over the water (steel bridge) to on the road (Formula SAE, Supermileage) to offroad (Baja SAE, SAE Clean Snowmobile) to in the air (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, SAE Aero Design, concrete airplane). And for those of you keeping count at home, I didn't get to quite a few teams, and even if I did I'd probably miss a few that I have limited knowledge of. 'Nuff said.

Now, why limit yourself to robotics competitions? Sure, you know them quite well. But you're also depriving yourself of the opportunity to grow in another direction. I've been on the SAE Aero Design team for 5 years now, but my senior design project is the NASA Lunabotics competition. (Aren, if you're going to that competition, we should meet up sometime.) I've learned a lot about teaming, flight, crashing (:eek:), and dealing with (lack of) success from the Aero team that I really don't think I picked up in FRC.

Sometimes, getting out of that comfort zone is the best thing that can happen to you.

Oh, and protip: Two or more engineering competitions at once and you're slightly crazy. Two or more with anything above a freshman's homework level (or that of a senior with senioritis) and you can remove the "slightly" from that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some homework to get back to...

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

There really isn't anything else like FIRST... it is truly unique.

I'm sorry that I have to derail and ask but why are you ruling out battlebots? I've been competing in robot combat events for the past 3 years and never had bad time at an event. It's completely different than FIRST but don't rule it out.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I just wanted to norrow down the responses to non-battle bot competitions. Is there a main site for all the different divisions of battlebots?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Aren, I heard you even value that Wall-E robot over people...

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I haven't seen VEX mentioned yet. I'm currently a college student mentoring a high school VEX team, and it works much better than FRC for me schedule-wise. Since the competition runs year-round, our team holds once-a-week meetings on the weekends, meaning that I don't have to sacrifice my school nights to come help out.

VEX also has a collegiate-level competition division you might be interested in, but I don't know much about it.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

http://buildersdb.com/ hosts registration for most "battlebots" (robot combat) events, except for RoboGames/ComBots where registration happens on http://robogames.net/. I compete in events hosted by North East Robotics Club (http://nerc.us/)

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Not talking about mentoring but participating, does working on a VEX Collegiate team seem like you would be keeping to "in the box"? I've considered doing VEX in college next year, but feel like maybe that would be sticking with something I'm already too familiar with.

I've also been considering the C.A.R.D. competition but wasn't sure if it was still happening/planning to continue/how strong it was.

This is a great thread.

-Nick

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

At Embry Riddle they have a Robotics program like F.I.R.S.T. Its pretty cool! I cant wait to join them! They dont have enough girls! If you want, I can give you the information about it!

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Shameless pitch for Michigan Tech.

The Robotic Systems Enterprise is expanding, working on the beginning stages of an underwater glider and possibly CARD if we happen to find one of those elusive money trees lying around anywhere. :p

We also mentor a few FIRST teams. It's a challenge, but a lot of us have been through it.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

is it only offered there?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I would recommend that you seriously think about mentoring as a freshman, but that you don't rule out. Spend time with the team and slowly ramp up your availability, if at a certain point you can't handle it then ramp it down. I worked with two CAT engineers and a freshman in college this Fall from October to December, and the freshman was there more often than me, and was there at every single meeting. He even continued to mentor the FRC team, and was basically there 6/7 days of the week, for our meetings for FRC (I'm pretty sure I made less meetings). It's definitely possible, just be careful.



What program is this?




Also currently a junior in college, I run a club, that has several teams that compete in:
JSDC - University of Illinois competition, jsdc.ec.illinois.edu
IGVC - Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition hosted by AUVSI at Oakland, MI
Lunabotics - which someone already mentioned
VEX College Competition - which probably comes the closest besides CARD, and is relatively cheap to get a team started in

Beyond that there are these:
Battlebots - you know what that is
AUVSI - in addition to IGVC hosts a bunch of different competitions, land, water, and sky based
RoboCup - You build a team of robots that compete in a game of soccer
RoboOlympiad - or something like that, I'll look it up for you, they have a multitude of competitions, from SumoBots, to RoboCup type games, to building like a MazeBot (MouseBot or something).


Wanted to add info about CARD as well. Probably the closest to FRC, and it tries to spread the same values of FIRST unlike other competitions, but it's currently having a lot of difficulty getting up and running. As of now the competition for this year has been postponed, because a lot of the involved are also heavily involved in FIRST. If anyone is ever interested in CARD, I suggest going to the website and e-mailing them.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I believe shes referring to Riddles CARD team

We have a world champion formula SAE team here at A&M but its not open to freshmen-sophmores.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

If you're asking about whether collegiate VEX is limiting in the level of robotics you get to use, I don't think so at all. I know the rules are much more "open" than the high school competition about the use of custom electronics. More motors and sensors are allowed, and there's more of an emphasis on programming - I'm fairly certain the game is 1 minute of autonomous mode, then 1 minute teleop, as opposed to 20 second auton and 2 minute teleop of high school VEX (and FRC). In that sense, it's a more accurate simulation of real-world robotics than the "glorified RC cars" of FRC. I don't think being "too familiar" with this area is a problem at all - there's plenty of room for expansion and lots to learn still.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

In college VEX you build both robots in your alliance. This gives you those ability to create robots that partner together.

There are also relaxed rules on sensor electronics, so you can add Arduino type boards to do off board processing. You also can build / machine components out of polycarb blocks and hefty metal items. There are about 80 teams and growing. Two biggest areas are New Zealand with about 8 teams and the 2011 Championship along with Mexico with 10 teams. STEMRobotics supports a PA team KTOR and a FL team CAKE.

See the VEX site and forums for more details.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

The one I didn't see mentioned (and maybe thats because it's currently idle) is the DARPA Grand/Urban Challenges, for fully autonomous vehicles.

I didn't know about Lunabotics, that's pretty cool; is that a yearly thing with different games each year, or is it new, or what?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I highly recommend either Formula SAE, as it's already a huge competition around the world, or C.A.R.D. Here at Milwaukee School Of Engineering, most of our teammates were FRC members and, as stated above, it's simply a year long, less restricted FRCompetition. Both are really quite fun in their own ways!

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

How much does these competitions cost? Like entry fees and materials for the VEX bots?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

College VEX is great.

-Nick

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Glad to hear you say that. I would have, but you beat me to it.

Robotics is great (I am sure everyone can agree on that) but there are also a lot of other engineering challenges out there. In addition to the points you made, it is can be very expensive and require a large variety of skills to help put together a quality robotics program. It is sometimes easier for a smaller school to fund and staff some more focused competitions than robotics. A collage with a very strong mechanical engineering program but a limited software or electronics program might find a different kind of competition fits their focus better. I hope I do not offend anyone too much here, but in my opinion, there is at least some chance, robotics may not the be the absolute be all and end all of all engineering achievement.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I got a nice challenge working on the high mileage vehicle in college...not robotics at all, and it taught me a lot.

I dont think it matters too much what you do, as long as you do something that lets you apply what you're learning in class.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Don't get stuck in the robot trap. There are a lot of engineers in the world, and only a very small portion of them do robots for a living. Branch out and give some other collegiate competition a try -- you can always come back to FIRST if nothing else gets you going.

“I think they are a bit over-rated. It’s certainly fun to do — for all parties involved: Students, Teachers, Parents. But robotics is such a narrow slice of the totality of STEM that I worry other dimensions of learning might get sidestepped in the process.” -Neil DeGrasse Tyson on FIRST as a vehicle for getting kids into STEM

(Which begs the question, if FIRST only excites students about robots is it fulfilling its mission?)

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

alright, Thanks!

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Go to the site that two of us linked to back on page one. If you can't find it, http://www.nasa.gov/offices/educatio...unabotics.html. You can see prior years by following the YouTube link on the left side of that page.

The game is simple: Dig dirt from a given zone, and bring it back to where you started from. This part doesn't change much if any year-to-year. The part that changes? Size and mass requirements.

So why is this a college-level competition, you ask? Because there is one requirement that makes life miserable, and one feature of the game that does the same thing. Everything has to be lunar-plausible, and the dirt is a lunar soil simulant which has some nasty properties.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

This.

I'd suggest Formula SAE as my favorite of the SAE competitions. There are so many other SAE competitions everyone finds something they like: Baja, Aero Design, Clean Snowmobile, and Supermilage. There are solar powered cars (as mentioned). There is the AIChE Chem-E-Car competition.

A number of colleges have their own competitions. My college had a sumo robot competition and a seek-and-destroy competition, both as classes.

As general advice: broaden your horizons during college, don't just focus on robotics. You might find that you like something else a bit more. I found out that I like building and driving races cars just as much (maybe even more) than I like building robots.

Edit:

As creative and awesome as FRC robots are, they are quite restrictive in terms of materials and equipment. It's an entirely different design and engineering experience when the rules are truly opened up to the use of anything you can possibly design, build, or buy.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I compete in a competition called Mech Warfare (www.mech-warfare.com/). It is a form of robot fighting in a way, but the robots do not destroy each other, they track airsoft bb hits via sensor panels to track scores. I personaly see the competition as a engineering challenge, as the robots are required to be walking robots, and have to carry a fairly large payload (airsoft guns, wireless camera, battery, target panels). Also, the community helps each other and shares designs, code, ect, it is not what you would expect with robot fighters. Although i will warn you that a LOT of people say they will build a robot, but never do - so some people may not take you too seriously until you share your progress.

Here is a video of my robot from last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrhlYsF2uTU

The competition is held at Robogames, i'd recommend taking a look at that event as there are about 60 different competitions you could enter.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I second the IEEE contests. They also have software, T-Shirt, website, and ethics contests at an annual meeting in the Southeast every year. Here was the list of last year's contests at a conference that I attended. They leave the work/practice room open all day and night prior to the contest. Rules are stricter - no non student help.

http://www.southeastcon2012.org/StudentProgram.html

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Probably preaching to the choir here, but absolutely. I met a kid this summer who was really not excited about his job saying "He only wanted to do robots." I'm sorry, but pointing to a $330 million airplane and saying "That part is mine." is awesome. Not to mention while most robotics challenges are within the reach of a hobbyist, big engineering challenges like commercial airplanes, bridges, highways, trains and things of that nature really operate on another order of awe inspiring magnitude.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

There are train competitions/challenges?

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

Probably not, but there are engineering jobs designing trains...I think that was his point. You can get a job making really neat, big things that are not robots...they are even more amazing

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

oh, neat.

Re: Robotics after FRC
 

I'd like to second this comment. I work in the area of industrial automation and the systems that make things, or move things, or monitor things use the same skills as you need to build an FRC Robot. And are usually at least as cool and extremely sophisticated (but they're not always built in 6 weeks).

Most of them don't have wheels. And it's usually not just one robot, but many working together.

How about this VW Plant. Order your car, and watch it being finished.

Another example, have you ever wondered what happens after you click the "buy" on a website. They guaranteed that if you ordered by 4pm it would ship the same day - that's not a trivial problem. The warehouse is just a huge robot thousands of square feet in size. It has to decide where your items are in the warehouse, how best to get them on a conveyor (often a mile or more long) and into one spot where they all end up in a box addressed to you. If you think finding a basketball target is difficult, imagine scheduling thousands of "picks", efficiently and without any errors. (There are "human" players too - you have to make their lives easy if you want to limit errors and keep them as employees).

Oh, you mentioned competitive. Get the order wrong and you either have to pay to fix the problem, and/or you loose the customer.

This video of how FedEx works is aimed at a younger age group, but still gives a good overview. There a thousands of PLCs (the equivalent of a cRIO) controlling every aspect of the operation, and they're all talking to progressively larger system so that FedEx knows where every package is all the time.

AND the whole sort has to occur between about midnight, when the planes arrive and 5am when the airports revert to passenger traffic. Miss a sort, and you have to refund all the next-day packages (millions of dollars), and have your customers consider UPS next time.

A small cog in a large wheel, the machine that dispense fuses is automated to the point where it will automatically re-order when the stock gets low - a fuse dispensing robot, although it always stays bolted to the floor. Loosing millions of dollars because you don't have a fuse is not an option - did you think of that when you designed the system?

Manufacturing is what generates wealth. Nothing else does. Moving money on Wall Street is just imaginary. You have to create something, cars, trains, electronics, washing machines (not a trivial control problem), widgets of any kind - taking raw materials and making something useful from them.

Manufacturing in the US seems to be undervalued. Witness the politician being eager to bail out the banks, but not so keen to help the auto industry.

It's manufacturing that provides good jobs. To be successful we need to manufacture in the US, not import everything and for that to be successful needs automation - robots. And who better to provide those than FRC alumni?