Quote:
Originally Posted by om23
So there's a new award out and its REALLY AWESOME. But I have some concerns about it. What are they expecting students to make within in three months. Is it too time consuming to finish in such a short amount of time?
And what kind of 'inventions' are they expecting?
I understand that fact that they're letting us do what we want to do and its all independent and all but FIRST should in some way at least help the participants protect their ideas and projects. Its not easy to file for Patents and its costly too.
Here's the link:
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...nnovator-award |
It will be very difficult to get something out in three months.
The challenges, problems to be solved are:
- National Academy of Engineering 14 Grand Challenges : http://www.engineeringchallenges.org
- Autonomy, navigation, and mobility solutions for emergency, rescue, and security responses
- Revolutionizes robotics for the mass market
- Solutions for home, hospital, and public environments
- Space solutions – lunar robots, mars robots, satellite autonomous programming
The cost for a provisional filing is very low, $ 125 - $ 250. The cost in terms of effort and finances to fulfill may vastly exceed the filing fee. Some of you may figure out how to really get things done on the cheap.
On the idea protection I disagree with you.
It is your idea, your project, your invention, your innovation. Up to the point that you have developed the project and gotten ready for a venture capitalist to inspect, it is your cost, sweat, etc. That is how invention, innovation, entrepreneurship works. And I'd bet filing a provisional patent is far easier than creating your invention.
This is great news indeed. We recently opened the
Kell Robotics Innovation Center with many goals. One of the goals is to help train students inside and outside of our team about invention and innovation. Unfortunately that has been a hard sell to many FIRST'ers. Witness the lack of traffic on
this thread. Alas, I whine.
But this is GREAT news for the FIRST community.