"Regional Competition Edition" of Fresh From the Forum

[Ken Leung]

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I. Overview of Regionals and Online webcasts
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There were 5 exciting regional the past 2 weekends, and 4 regionals this weekend. Here is this list of regionals:

March 7th~9th
NASA Langley/VCU regional, Richmond, Virginia
NASA Kennedy Space Center Southeast Regional, Florida

March 14th~16th
Buckeye Regional, Cleveland, Ohio
Lone Star Regional, Houston, Texas
SBPLI Long Island Regional, Long Island, New York

March 21st~23rd
Great Lakes Regional, Ypsilanti, Michigan
Johnson & Johnson Mid-Atlantic Regional, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Philadelphia Regional, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

March 28th~31st
Pacific Northwest Regional, Seattle, Washington
Silicon Valley Regional, San Jose, California
Motorola Midwest Regional, Evanston, Illinois

April 4th~6th
St. Louis Regional, St. Charles, Missouri
UTC New England Regional, New Haven, Connecticut
Southern California Regional, Los Angeles, California
West Michigan Regional, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Canadian Regional, Toronto, Ontario


A lot of robots did really great at each and every one of them. It was tons of fun to watch the competitions, even if only through online broadcast. Each robot at those competitions is unique in its own way, and together with other 40~50 robots, you get a regional competition with endless strategies and game play. The webcasts of the regionals demonstrated just that: Returning teams from past years showing off to rookies how much they learned from the competition, while rookies put on impressive robots that show they too, can be competitive in the competition… Everyone cheering as loud as they can no matter which teams are playing on the field, or even if their team didn’t win the award being announced.

Every match have something different happening depending on what robots were paired together, and each robot performed impressive moves to compliment their alliance partner attempting to win each match while maximizing qualifying points. The finals are even more exciting when each alliance give 120% of what they got, to win each match trying to advance to the next level. Very cool competition this year.

If you don’t know already, Dave Lavery posted a list of regionals that will be broadcasted this season. A lot of people get to watch a regional competition far from them because of that. Trust me; we know there were lots of people watching the webcasts… We could tell by how much re-buffering Real player had to do and how unclear the video stream was. (actually, there were about 200~300 viewers watching the regionals online the past weekends) You can watch the online broadcast @ http://robots.nasa.gov/ . In addition, even if you don’t have NASA TV online, you can watch online broadcast of NASTA TV @ http://www.broadcast.com/learning_an...sa_television/ .

Check out Dave’s post for details (Thanks Dave!).
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&threadid=2706

Here is the list of regionals being broadcasted online:

March 7-9: KSC southeast & VCU VA regional
March 14-16: Buckeye Cleveland & Lone Star Houston regional
March 21-23: Philadelphia regional
March 28-30: Silicon Valley & Pacific Northwest regional
April 4-6: St. Louis & Southern California regional

In addition, NASA TV will be broadcasting the following regionals at the indicated date:

March 16: Lone Star regional
March 30: Silicon Valley regional
April 26-27: National Championship event (all three days)

Information on the rest of regional competition including site info, agenda, team lists, and hotel can be found @ http://www.usfirst.org/robotics/rgevents.htm. But since FIRST isn’t the quickest in announcing the awards online, I will keep you informed of posts on the forum announcing which teams won what award.