MIT is running their High School Zero Robotics program again this fall.
Very cool opportunity for high school robotics team. Our team has been participating in this competition for the last few years as a warm up for our programmers. Here is a description from the MIT website:
“Zero Robotics” is a robotics programming competition where the robots are SPHERES satellites inside the International Space Station. The competition starts online, on this website, where teams compete to solve an annual challenge guided by mentors. Participants can create, edit, share, save, simulate and submit code, all from a web browser. After several phases of virtual competition, finalists are selected to compete in a live championship aboard the ISS. An astronaut will conduct the championship competition in microgravity with a live broadcast!
Last year we were on a top ten alliance and received an invitation to go to MIT and participate. Five astronauts were there at MIT and we had a live hook up with the International Space Station. We got to see our code fly on the miniature satellites live! MIT took us for a private tour of their aerospace research labs. It was thrill of a lifetime for all that participated.
As a participant and finalist in this competition last season also, I highly recommend that every person mildly interested in programming participates. There are many things that FIRST teaches, and Zero Robotics teaches different things. For example:
By the end of the season, you will end up with a second-nature familiarity with vectors, no matter how bad you were to start.
You will also learn the finer points of game theory, as the cooperative element of the competition is very different from FIRST.
FRC uses a fairly capable programming platform, with a decent amount of flexibility. The Zero Robotics API is very limiting, and you have to write in C90 (no variable declarations in the middle of a block, among other annoyances)
The focus on programming is much greater than that of FRC, since there is no physical robot. Our code last season had to account for every possible action the opponent could make, and ended being a fairly complex state machine.
The simulation environment that your code runs in was fairly deterministic last season (this will probably change in the coming season). Programming deterministic systems is different from a FRC robot, where nothing happens twice the same way.
Again, the Zero Robotics competition is pretty amazing, and I think every programmer out there should look into it.
I, too recommend Zero Robotics for anyone who is interested in programming, or even anyone who is a good strategist. Skinkworks is spot on! It’s a lot of collaboration, fun, and it will take your skills at a programmer to the next level. I definitely learned a lot and will probably do it in the fall again.
The programmers from our team, rookie team 3970, and another team 3495 collaborated as the Central Valley Manhattan Project and with our alliance (#12) made it to the Semi-Finals of ZRSC. The Duncan Dynamics rookie team was seeded 5th in both FRC competitions due to excellent Hybrid shooting, winning Rookie-All Star, highest Rookie Seed, and Rookie Inspiration awards. Good way to start FRC already knowing some things about code, right?!
We have a question. The website says the high school competition starts in September. Can we start doing stuff now ? Get access to the tools and write the software and use the simulation to perform last years task ?
Yes you can! Get an account and you can start using their IDE interface.
With summer coming on I think they want to get the word out because the competition starts early September.
I have found support to be quite helpful if you have a question.
I’m going to tell my programmers about this. They love two things: Software, and Minecraft, and they need something besides Minecraft to do over the summer (maybe even get outside). Thanks for sharing this!
