Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

I would like to be involved with this outstanding effort. I have been in FIRST a long time now (9+ years) and I would like myself and my company, FAST Robotics which makes Quadrotor UAV's to be involved. Who should I approach for this?

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Hi Everyone,

I am Grant from CARD team 6 (SCOE Robotics @ Milwaukee School of Engineering). I am the teams secretary and webmaster. I also worked on the network design team.

I had a LOT of FUN in St. Louis!

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Hi all, this is Keith, the team leader from Pace's robotics team. If you don't remember, we're the ones that didn't really get anything accomplished and I had some questions I was hoping the other teams could answer.

-How did you guys finance your projects? How did you find benefactors? Our quad budget was around $500-$600 which meant no backup parts and cheap construction to begin with... This is what killed us since, after we crashed it, we had to poke around trying to figure out what was wrong with it (props to Platteville for all the help).

-What majors were your team members? I imagine most of you all were engineering majors? Any CS?

Those were the main two questions I had. Also, have you guys already started working on newer/better revisions? Do we have any idea what future competitions will be?

Thanks in advance

EDIT: Also, how many members did you guys have?

Re: College/Aerial Robotics Info
 

Hi Keith!

1. GO FIRST was financed by a grant we had requested before we learned about this competition that we were originally going to use for a demonstration ground robot. That money ended up going to the first part of the Quad Copter.

We were also financed by our College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, who with out their support we wouldn't have been able to cover the trip down to the event. They covered our travel, hotel, and marketing costs making them our largest sponsors. They are unable to support individual FRC teams around the area (they do help sponsor and promote the regional) so being able to support a Collegiate team from their school is an avenue where they would be able to support FIRST.

We also were able to get into contact with ATK a company who ended up giving us a donation that allowed us to finish our Quad copter.

National Instruments was able to sponsor us with an in-kind donation of a single board rio.

For ATK and NI both companies we were able to connect with at a career event where one of our students mentioned their involvement in FIRST and what we were doing now.

A local technical college, Dunwoody Institute of Technology, was able to help us by welding our GV frame together.

Additional money came from grants from the school and from other FRC teams for parts and from the local student chapter of IEEE that reserves money to help student groups on projects similar to this.

Next year we have student service fees to work with.


2. Our majors include- Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, CSCI, and mine is Scientific and Technical Communications.

3. We have 15 members involved with CARD and about 30 who are part of GO FIRST. We really have 20 core members in our organization.

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

We contacted several different companies by getting their university relations contact and sending them information about who we are and what we're trying to get involved in. We actually didn't get that much money (about a $1000 from Qualcomm) and we made ours out of aluminum so it didn't really break. We also kind of ran around got some help from the ECE Machine Shop. We also got additional funding for travel from our Engineering Council, which was awesome!!

We had 1 MechE, 3 CS and 4 ECE


Well, we got some advice on how to program our quadrocopter, and gave us a mini-lecture on control systems. Our problem was that we couldn't get it flying because of our PID tuning. So we're going to be trying that system out soon.

I think that future competitions will probably revolve around Aerial Vehicles nooooooo Idea what the game will be though.

10 people in all, 8 people that came to the competition.

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

I'm on the network and robot communication group for CARD 6, SCOE, from MSOE.

I can't answer the financing question, if Dave comes back he would know, but I can tell you that the majority of our members are Computer or Software engineering students. We have a couple Electrical, one or two mechanical, and even a couple business students.

I think for next year it needs to be aerial game, but in stead of the ground vehicle we need an underwater vehicle. :) It would be a good incentive not to crash your UAV.

EDIT: We have about 20 members, with about ten core members.

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Thanks for your interest, I passed your message along to the other members of the game design committee and I hope they'll get back to you shortly. Renee Becker, who posted earlier in this thread, would be a good person to contact. She has done much of the fund raising and coordination of our demo. Otherwise, I would be happy to talk with you. My email is fairbanksd at msoe.edu


1) Finding sponsors was incredibly difficult for us. We got promptly started by a donation by my father, but we were left without much money to start building robots. Our faculty adviser made a donation, which allowed us to finally get started. Eventually, I had a break with IEEE Milwaukee Chapter, where I wowed them with my professionalism and preparedness. IEEE is a good match for us because they do not sponsor FRC teams because there are too many in the Milwaukee area. IEEE was also looking for a way to support FIRST! We also had to collect a large sum from every team mate who wanted to come with us to the competition, and luckily most of the team members were able to pay it. MSOE helped us with transportation and some of the hotel cost. Our total budget resulted at around $5,000 but we could have done it with much less. We did not have any spare quad parts, not even props, and the GV was made with primarily borrowed parts.

2) Our team is mostly CE/SE with a couple EE, ME, and business students. 12 of our members came to St. Louis, and we had about 15 active members total.

3) New revisions of the quad are in the plan. The GV will hopefully be prettied up and put on display on campus.

The GDC hasn't had an official meeting or conference call since the event (that I know of??), however I may or may not have started writing up a proposal for next year's game/s ;)

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Hi all,
I was on team 5, GO FIRST from the University of Minnesota, and I want to express how cool it was for me to be able to do something like CARD. I was never in FIRST in high school, so this has been the first time I've had a chance to participate in a robotics competition of any kind; it was awesome! Our team has since the competition already begun discussing how to revamp our bots - I'm really hoping that FIRST decides to keep this program going. It was great to find a student group here at the U that was right up my ally, and I can imagine that there are a lot of people who wish their colleges did similar things. Keep it up!
Mark Jorgensen

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Now I know what I'm going to be spending time on in college, assuming I get there of course. But anyway, that will likely be a time sink (besides doing coursework of course!) unless I get distracted by helping out on a FRC team. Best yet, my top two personal choices, UW-Platteville and MSOE, have already started teams! So I'm looking forward to joining even though that's still a couple of years away as I'm class of 2011, but hey, I can still dream, can't I?

One last thing, looking at the list, I'm sorta surprised that about half the teams are from the Midwest area. Anyone got a reason for that other than coincidence?

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

My guess would be that there are more personal relationships between the students on these teams that helped to spread the word about the competition.

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

That sounds about right. Thanks.

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Someone should help me clarify this, but there was a group of schools who attended the FIRST for Life conference in 2010. It was there where Dean Kamen talked and inspired the founders to create this event. ITR ran with it and started designing the game. There were a number of other teams involved as well but I'm not sure exactly who they are. The numbers of the teams are based on who joined when and GO FIRST team #5 was the first to join after their Kick off December 3rd, but we didn't finalize team numbers until later.

Through this process there were other teams who indicated interest in attending but due to funds or lack of notice of the game, they were unable to field a team.

I'm not sure why there's such a great concentration around the Midwest though. Does anyone else have other thoughts?

Also J93Wagner if you decide to come visit UofM-TC let us know!

Thanks,

Renee

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

Well they kind of got it. It was because it was a big turnout from the midwest for the conference. Plus IIT was the principal school behind CARD, just so happened that many of the schools were Midwestern.

Since IIT was the principal school, ITR (team #1) was definitely in there. UIUC (Team #7) got involved because we found a thread on CD. Perhaps the rest of the teams can explain how the got involved?

We actually had almost 20 teams (I believe 16 or 18 was the number) at one point. That included, WPI, Southern Maryland, Princeton, Northeastern, CMU to name a few. There were a bunch of colleges that we were in contact with for a while but due to funding, bad timing and many other issues, it just didn't work out.

Looks like the Midwest just has a pretty strong alumni group. :D

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

I wasn't particularly planning on making a visit to MN for college visits, but hey, it just might be worth it now. I'll see you there, maybe... If not, well, I'll probably be on a CARD team after I graduate from high school, but that's still assuming I can go to college in the first place!

Re: College/Areial Robotics Info
 

I know that here at University of Minnesota GO FIRST Team #5 we got interested in CARD really back in the late fall when some people we knew at IIT mentioned to us about CARD and quad copters. I think it's mainly from word of mouth and people from the midwest who knew people involved in planning at IIT. It's a geographic logistics thing.

Also, I'd like to mention how awesome a time I had participating in CARD. It was a real time sink, but it was well worth it and I learned a lot more about engineering and designing than I did in any of my Freshman engineering classes this year.