Hello Chief!
I’ve posted a lot in the past about the state of FIRST alumni in universities and colleges across North America, and how to engage FIRST alumni once they leave high school. To sum it all up, FIRST has an alumni problem, plain and simple. FIRST alumni head off to university and join their alumni group, talk about the old days, then stop after 1 or 2 meetings because they realize all they do is talk about the old days. Some might start mentoring, but that number is far too small; I’ve seen it first hand. That’s why we brought Robot in 3 Days to the University of Waterloo last year, and it worked great - we’re doing it again this year, and beyond! While just 3 days worked well for a lot of participants, a resounding number said they wanted more. They didn’t want to stop building in 3 days, or in 6 weeks. They wanted to do it year round, just like other design teams at UW.
This year, we’re not slowing down, and have started a student design team at UW as a long term solution to our alumni problem. We’ve named the team the University of Waterloo Robotics Engineering and Autonomous Controls Team, or UW REACT. Our goal is to build a fully autonomous FIRST robot for each years FRC challenge. When we say fully autonomous, we mean it: no driver, no kinect, nothing: just software for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Our build season is going to start alongside every other FRC team at kickoff in January, and continue for 6-8 months until off-season events begin in the summer, from June until August. We’ve got one off-season event already lined up for August, and are actively approaching many events north and south of the border. We’re also going to be (almost) completely FIRST legal, breaking only one rule - bag and tag. Everything we do is going to be completely open source, and we hope to open our initiative to FIRST alumni regardless of their proximity to UW.
These are just the cliff-notes, and we’ve been working around the clock building the infrastructure to support our mission; we’re posting here because we need the communities help in completing that mission. We are inviting anyone who wants to help us by contributing to our source code (or designs) to apply as a non-student. Although our primary goal is to build a fully autonomous FIRST robot to engage students at UW, we hope to deploy a lot software that will be usable by the FIRST community. We’re also posting here because we know a number of off-season organizers frequent Chief, and although we are already approaching many event organizers, if having us compete at your off-season interests you, please email us at [email protected]. A lot more information will be available on our website very soon; if you have any other specific inquiry about our team before then, please don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected].
I hope you’re as excited about Deep Space as we are! We’re especially excited to be bringing a realization of the impending autonomy apocalypse to high school students worldwide. We hope you join us along for the ride, and help make our pilot year one to remember!