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Unread 30-07-2010, 01:54
Peter Johnson Peter Johnson is offline
WPILib Developer
FRC #0294 (Beach Cities Robotics)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Rookie Year: 2008
Location: Redondo Beach, CA
Posts: 247
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Preparing CS students for the Robotics Revolution

The most recent Communications of the ACM has an interesting opinion article entitled "Preparing Computer Science Students for the Robotics Revolution" that mentions FIRST:

Quote:
High school robotics contests such as US FIRST ... emphasize the mechanical engineering aspects of the field at the expense of computer science ... The public doesn't always appreciate that the elaborate hardware platforms students construct must be primarily teleoperated because students aren't being taught the kind of software that would allow their robots to act autonomously.
This is a bit unfair. It's definitely true of FRC, but FLL is a different story.

The article goes on to talk about what's missing:
Quote:
Real robotics involves deep, computationally demanding algorithms. Machine vision, probabilistic localization and navigation, kinematics calculations, grasp and path planning, multi-robot coordination, and human-robot interaction (face tracking, speech and gesture recognition) are core technologies. Today these are found mainly in advanced research labs and graduate-level robotics courses, but they can be made accessible to undergraduates. The time to do that is now.
How can we as mentors, teams, and the FIRST community as a whole better encourage our high school students to explore these areas? I'm seeing progress on this just in the last couple of years in FRC: much more powerful robot processor, provided vision code, games more friendly to vision (2010 much more than 2009, although even in 2010 we didn't see very much vision-based autonomous), even discussions on CD regarding fully autonomous robots. MatLab Simulink availability could help with the physical/kinematics modeling. Tweaks in future game designs could also help encourage student programmer involvement, excitement, and innovation in autonomy (e.g. higher autonomous bonuses? longer autonomous periods? aspects of the game which are hard to fully teleoperate?). What other things would help stimulate and maintain interest in the CS portion of robotics within FIRST beyond FLL?

Link to article for reference purposes (unfortunately $ required to read): http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/8...ution/abstract
__________________
Author of cscore - WPILib CameraServer for 2017+
Author of ntcore - WPILib NetworkTables for 2016+
Creator of RobotPy - Python for FRC

2010 FRC World Champions (294, 67, 177)
2007 FTC World Champions (30, 74, 23)
2001 FRC National Champions (71, 294, 125, 365, 279)