[David Brinza]

FIRST Robotics Competition

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way.

So tell me, is FIRST about competition? The above quote is cut-and-paste directly from the FIRST website. Competition is so central to what we do, that "competition" or "competitive" appears in the first sentence 3 times.

The spirit of the competition is what inspires many of us to be involved with FIRST. We all enjoy seeing a well-designed and built robot being effectively operated by skilled drivers. Not all of the teams will have the resources to compete at the level of the top teams in FIRST and they shouldn't (and usually don't) measure their success in terms of beating those teams on the field. Yet, many of these "have not" teams improve their capabilities by learning from and emulating the successful designs and strategies of top teams. That is an example of competition inspiring teams to do better - a worthy goal indeed.

I think FIRST will lose out if the playing field were leveled by continuing to place severe and somewhat arbitrary restrictions on when the teams can improve robot capabilities. If the "leveled playing field" results in kit robots with little sophistication as the norm, the FRC will become less attractive. Engineering professionals, spectators and ultimately the students will be less inspired to participate and the FIRST program will decline.

I'm not advocating "open season" on robot development, but the "powers that be" need to be sensitive to the fact that some additional time needs to be allotted for things like software development to utilize the exciting technologies that FIRST offers (the camera, the sensors, etc.). The current 6-week build season just doesn't provide the software team enough time to exercise their code on a functional robot. So, software is usually "done" during competitions and (if the team has the resources) with practice robots during FIX-IT WINDOWS.

In future seasons, FIRST should make allowances for the complexity of the technologies available to teams and expand the time available for development and test. FIRST should also make allowances for the availability of the professional engineering mentors - we often set high standards and are driven to succeed. But we have our day jobs - six plus weeks of intense, dedicated effort followed by restricted windows of opportunity probably doesn't work well for most of us. Some flexibility in the scheduling and use of post-ship time can make a big difference to many of us. The resulting improved "product" on the field will serve to further inspire the whole of FIRST to be at its best.