What was CARD 2011-2013

kingc95 · June 30, 2025, 8:24pm

CARD - Collegiate Aerial Robotics Demonstration (History + Resources)

@EricH had mentioned that FIRST dabbled with the concept of a Collegiate robotics league — and he was right. That kicked off a deep-dive investigation.

Wikipedia Entry has some info
The Wayback Machine provided even more
And ultimately, I got in touch with the original head of the pilot FIRST-adjacent program.

This means I have the original program documentation and game manual!

A deeper history is coming later — but I wanted to lay down the base facts here, since CD has very little on this forgotten sibling league.

What was CARD?

Collegiate
Aerial
Robotics
Demonstration

Kickoff Video for 2011 Pilot

This idea was presented at 2010 Worlds in Atlanta to college-aged FIRST alumni and volunteers.
Led by Dean Kamen, Woodie Flowers, and Chris Anderson (Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine), they imagined an NCAA of flying robots.

Dr. Karina J. Powell and Dr. Christopher L. Jones (Laine) helped form the original committee, working with WPI and FIRST to make this a reality.
Huge thanks to Dr. Jones for emailing me back and sharing event photos and docs!

With approval from both Dean and Woodie, the pilot launched at 2011 Worlds with 10 participating teams.
Unfortunately, FIRST did not favor the format and ended the partnership after the pilot.
The CAR group continued on independently for two more seasons, but it never truly took off.

Downloads:

CAR Program Manual v1.1 (166.5 KB)
CAR Game Manual v1.1 (3.2 MB)

The 2011 Game Format

CARD 2011 was meant to be a triathlon-style event with three different game challenges.
In reality, FIRST Flight was used mostly as a practice field and wasn’t run as originally intended.

FIRST Flight

Teams used only aerial robots.
They had to fly through a literal 3D version of the FIRST logo, earning points for as many figure-8 laps as possible.

Images:

All Your Base

Air + Ground bots working together
Ground bots shoot projectiles
Aerial bots carry virtual payloads across the field
Points earned by capturing bases (air and ground bases differ!)
RFID tags verified base control
Bonus points for linear base connections

The Best Trajectory

Air + Ground bots again
A large barrier blocks ground robot vision
Aerial bots assist by flying over to give visual aid
Bonus: the targets move!

Background Threads

Discussions worth checking out for more context:

CARD Event Photos

Some of these were sent directly by Dr. Jones (Laine).

📷 View Photos

Event Videos from Online

▶️ Click to Expand

Ground Robots on display: https://youtu.be/Gu1EQHT4XBU
Ground robots in action: https://youtu.be/owhLVJa19rQ
Woodie Flowers talks about CARD!!!: https://youtu.be/f5jJ4geOzog
Practice match: https://youtu.be/IPVwAp6RhiE
Go FIRST Pit Tour: https://youtu.be/ilDbMOpJ9cI
CARD Semi Final: https://youtu.be/hum2TfdJyYo
FIRST Flight: https://youtu.be/y1ifViBZ6Lk
Oakland University Recap/Highlights: https://youtu.be/YzjgPE7M2tU

News / Press Mentions

🗞️ Click for Links

Were you there?

If you participated in CARD or saw it live at Worlds, please share your experience!
This wiki is open — feel free to add info, drop memories, or upload anything you’ve got.

The above was refactored via ChatGPT for clarity.

gerthworm · June 30, 2025, 9:04pm

Holy throwback batman!

So one of my oldest and most questionable github repositories was from a failed attempt at building a quadcopter for CARD. I had no internship between my freshman and sophomore years of college so, you know, thought I might build a quadcopter, from scratch.

Many questionable engineering decisions, including:

Arduino megas for everything
run the controls on a laptop, not onboard
Ship sensor data and motor commands back and forth over a serial port over an xbee

It flew once, hit the “turn off the motors cuz we lost coms”, and narrowly missed my friend’s car by a few feet.

I don’t have a picture handy but now I need to go back and see if I can find some. They were some of the first pictures I ever took on a cell phone camera.

Oh man, this is fun.

“Automatically migrated from code.google.com” should say something about the age of this project. 99% sure this was SVN at one point, not Git.

Here’s at least one photo of the frame and motors:

Richard_Wallace · June 30, 2025, 9:48pm

I have vague recollections of STL Champs around that time, expecting to see aerial robots built by college students but instead seeing waves of paper airplanes sailing out of the upper deck and down toward the FRC fields.

FletcherS7 · June 30, 2025, 9:52pm

Question to ponder that I have never gotten a definitive answer to.

Are CARD participants considered FIRST Alum.

kingc95 · June 30, 2025, 10:40pm

If it was 2011 before the split I’d be more likely to lean towards yes. After the split with FIRST they (CAR) couldn’t use terms like GP or Coopertition as these are wholly-owned by FIRST. Seems like it was a complete break where FIRST didn’t consider it related in any way anymore, ergo not Almuni of the program solely for being a CARD participant.

s3529 · June 30, 2025, 11:29pm

Maybe they can say they were CARD carrying members?

bobbysq · July 1, 2025, 1:06am

If only they could have agreed to cooperate to continue promoting this value while still being competing organizations…

AlexBurchard · July 1, 2025, 4:18am

Well this is a throwback. Those were fun times, working on painting the field elements together. We had a garage in Chicago that had like a defunct delorean sitting in it…

This was just before COTS drones became super common, so ‘quadcopters’ as we were calling them back then were a much bigger challenge than today, where you can just go pick one up at Walmart.