FIRST Robotics Competition – Success Without a Trophy

FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a robotics community that prepares young people for the future through a suite of inclusive, team-based robotics programs for ages 4-18. ASI engineer, Dennis Dohogne, has been a mechanical engineering mentor for robotics team #8775 at Creekside High School in St. Johns, FL since its inception last year in 2022. The extracurricular team is led by Kevin Davenport who teaches the Engineering Academy at Creekside.

The contests are different every year. The new game is announced in the first week of January and competitions start all over the world a mere 60 days later. This is not battlebots, but a wonderfully organized collaborative challenge. A robotics team is partnered with two other teams to form an alliance and is pitted against another three-team alliance. The teams change their bumper colors to correspond to their assigned alliance color, red or blue. A team will be matched with different teams and color alliances throughout the weekend. The result is an accurate ranking of the robots at the end of the 76 matches, with the top seeded teams advancing to the finals. Last year the Creekside team was the highest seeded rookie at the Orlando, FL Regional competition.

The robots can weigh close to 150 lbs, and the contests are daunting! They start with a 15 second autonomous period where the robots score solely on what they have been pre-programmed to do. Then the student drivers step up to their controllers and take over for the next 2+ minutes. Scoring usually involves collecting and depositing various game pieces in increasingly difficult arrangements, but also involves getting the robot off the floor as part of the endgame. This year that meant driving onto a tilting platform and balancing – made even more difficult since there was always another robot trying to also achieve that balance. Last year it involved having the robot climb a set of monkey bars that got progressively higher, and yes, we did it!

The students strategize how they are going to play the game, handle the game pieces and endgame, and then design, build, and program the robot. The students do mechanical design in SolidWorks 3D CAD and program in Java, Python, or other highlevel languages. They employ motors, cameras, sensors, gyroscopes, pneumatics, gears, belts, chains, 3D printing, zipties, and anything else to get the job done. Despite the many after-school and weekend hours spent it seems there is never enough time to prototype and refine the designs and programs, but they go for it anyway.

The Creekside team did not bring home a trophy this year but were nonetheless successful. There was not a single mechanical failure or repair needed, but incorrect settings for a current limiter and program macros without an override proved to be our downfall.

The success was how the students worked together and reacted to the problems; how they grew from this experience. The teamwork and communication were great. On their own the students formed into groups for scouting, modifying their strategies, organizing, problem solving, and accumulating lessons learned. They came away from the competition energized and enthused and are already working on how to do things better for next year.

Who needs a trophy?