Hi CD community! As you might have heard, we recently won our first ever District Chairman’s Award. This is new territory for our team, which has been around since 2002 but has only recently begun to see ourselves as a culture changing entity. It’s also our first year applying for this award since our rookie year. You can check out our video submission here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sun6wr-xg2Y
Much of our outreach efforts are focused on the FRC community. We work hard to raise the level of play for teams in our region as well as trying to increase understanding and usage of game changing technologies for teams everywhere.
If you’ve used our white papers, our code, our time logging system, or if you’ve just had a question answered by one of us on CD or in person, then let us know. We’d love to know how far our stripes reach. And as always, we’re always happy to answer other questions ([email protected]).
Personally I have been fascinated by the level of control you guys try to implement every year. Your Zebravision papers are an amazing resource for computer vision, and as someone who is very interested in neural net implementation, the work that guys published last year was a gold mine.Your team publishes many resources and is always willing to answer any questions I have…
Other than casual interactions here on CD I don’t think we’ve ever interacted with your team, but your very existence has had an impact on our team’s thinking. Certain teams stand out immediately in everyone’s minds. That is to say, your reputation precedes you.
We know 1114 and 2056 as teams that build highly competitive robots. We know 254 as the team that does amazing things with motion profiling. We know 900 as the team that does amazing things with vision.
The Zebracorns are a world-class team that meets FIRST’s every technical and nontechnical challenge with extreme grace. Because of their strong partnerships with their sponsors they have been able to do very high-level work in the realm of computer vision. Triple Helix thinks their “Zebravision” code is probably the most advanced vision system in FRC at the moment, and we are deeply thankful that they have published and shared their knowledge to further the growth and competitiveness of the entire FRC community. Triple Helix has, for the first time ever in 10 years of competition, fielded a working vision system thanks in large part to information we learned from Team 900.
If the Zebracorns have a weakness, it is in flying below the radar. The team has built and maintained a pretty awesome influence in the FRC community because within the past couple years they have found themselves at the forefront of some of the more interesting political and philosophical conversations in FIRST. These conversations are ultimately going to define the future of the FRC program for the better.
Team 900 is a fantastic group of people. When our teams both qualify for different Half Championships this year, we will very much miss competing with them.
Last thing: there’s many great things that have been said about how 900’s incredible efforts at the 2015 Championship made FRC into a more technically adept, bolder, and more mature competition. Among all that, we can’t forget that the Zebracorns brought so many broken GEM gearboxes to AndyMark’s expo booth in 2015, that the following year FIRST made the “Robot Service Center” an official part of the Championship.
Team 900’s posts about the Jetson TK1/TX1 as well as advice from Marshall were instrumental in 2383’s vision system success last year, a big part of our run into division elims at champs.
Seeing the innovation in computer vision (and in general) that 900 exhibits is truly inspiring.
