As of my sophmore year in highschool, my robotics experience has come from tinkering with Arduinos and involvement in an organization called FIRST. FIRST is an organization created by Dean Kamen, inventor, entrepeneur, creator of the Segway (cool right?).
Some background (Skip if you want)
FIRST’s goal is to “inpsire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators” through robotics competitions. FIRST engages children from kindergarten to high school through a 4 levels of competition. The first level, Junior FIRST LEGO League (Junior FLL), is targetted towards 5-13 year olds using LEGO Power Functions. First LEGO Leage (not junior) is targetted towards ages 9-13. FLL competitions incoporate LEGO Mindstorms and LEGO technic. The third and fourth levels, FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) are targetted towards high school students. FTC provides the TETRIX build system to build their competition robots while FRC are not limited to what is required to build their robots, allowing for more flexible designs. FTC and FRC use “modern” programming languages such as C++ and Java, while FLL uses the LEGO programming interface. FRC and FTC change their competition theme every year allowing for fresh new challenges.
Minor complaints (Skippable)
My experience primarily lies in FTC. I have never participated in FLL however I have helped volunteer in multiple FLL competitions. I do support and believe that all these competitions are very helpful in helping inspire engineering in young children. However, FLL and FRC’s impact is restrained compared to FTC as both require subsantial funding. As FLL is targetted towards young children, funding is handled by schools and parents, limiting it to areas with residents wealthy enough to support the programs. FTC and FRC both actively encourage students to fund their endeavours themselves, forcing students to reach out to local businesses and fundraise. However, FRC requires more advanced mentorship and much more resources. FRC bots can cost thousands of dollars and most importantly, require advanced mentors who have experience in engineering. However if all the resources are available, FRC is definitely the most fun. Because of the minimal-training-wheels approach, students learn real world engineering such as planning, prototyping, and manufacturing from scratch. I believe FTC strikes the best balance of being accessible to all. It gives you a customizable build system which can be limiting but also helps beginners. It is possible to build a bot without professional guidance. However, if professional mentoring is available it scales to be challenging for all. It doesn’t as high of a cost barrier. Fundraising is required but reasonable to many. Basically, I believe that out of the 4 levels FTC is the most accessible to all and if you are interested in starting a team, FTC is the way to go.
FTC Experience
It was my freshman year of high school in Germany. I had taken an interest in Arduinos and robotics programming. However, robotics is pricey and hard to find parts in the rural areas of Germany. Fortunately, someone in our school had started a FIRST team the previous year. I joined the school’s robotics club hoping to be able to play with some robots. The team was quite inexperienced and was very poorly organized. There were 2 teams (5/6 people each), one full of the older seniors and one full of the younger freshmen and sophmores. On the day FIRST announced the competion, both teams immediately started building the bot. Minimal planning, prototyping, etc. This was going to be a trial-and-error learning experience. One of our mentors, the chemistry teacher-Mr. Mol, was a retired Air Force engineer who had worked on rocket-assisted C-130’s and helped provide engineering mentorship. However, as immature students we did not heed Mr. Mol’s words. He let us learn by having us fall and learn from our mistakes the hard way (which I’m grateful for). We had basically stumbled our way through the intial creation of our bot. For the first month there was absolutely no organization. As the sole programmer, I was learning how to program the bot using FTC’s propreitary software/hardware. After a month of minimal progress, we finally decided to restructure. I organized a small prototyping team where we would program and test new designs for the two teams. The two teams would prototype designs while I led programming for both and started teaching 2 fellow students how to program. Our bot was slowly being built in time for our first competition.
Our first competition was in Italy. There weren’t enough teams in Germany for a local competition so all the FTC teams in Europe gathered in Aviano, Italy for the competition. The day prior to the competition we had an engineering pit set up in the gym of a school where the competition was being taken place. We made last minute tweaks to our autonomous programming. FIRST advocates an idea they have coined gracious professionalism. We had found another fellow team who had difficulties with their bot. Our team went over and helped them with tooling and programming. Throughout the competition there were many instances of teams helping out each other. It was a wonderful sight. Travelling to Italy with my team was a wonderful experience. Staying up together until 1am debugging our bot was a challenge but a unique and fun bonding experience. We had made it to the finals during the Aviano competition but unfortunately lost to an amazing team from the Netherlands. We came in second qualifying us a place in the World Competition in America.
We didn’t have the money to send our entire team to America so we were limited to four team members. Propitiously I went as lead programmer. It was a wonderful experience. Every team there had much better funding than us. Our bot was scrap metal compared to their amazing bots. Our engineering pit was empty while every other team had set up booths and banners. Nevertheless we had a great time talking to other teams and seeing how they engineered their bot. Unfortunately we ranked midway out of all the teams and did not win. We did make it much farther than we expected to considering how bad our bot was compared to every other team. In the end we had a great time.
Obstacles
Building within the engineering limits was a major challenge. The FIRST competition imposed many restrictions with what we could do. Size, weight, sensors, use of solenoids, motor strength, etc. So many factors that limited our design. We soon learned that the real world has many limitations that you are constrained by and it is part of the challenge and fun working within those limits. However our biggest obstacle was the lack resources. As a team established on a U.S. military base (in Germany) we were not allowed to take corporate sponsorships. Sponsorships and outreach to local companies is how most FTC and FRC fund their teams. This very detrimental. Our school did graciously provide us with a few hundred dollars in funding. We made all of our money from donations and bake sales. We set up a makeshift competition field in the local mall and showed off our bots to passerbys. Young children were enthused as we let them play with our bot. We made about a thousand dollars from bake sales and donations. Later to fund our tickets to America, we reached out to local groups begging for donations. On top of that, propreitary Tetrix sensors, motors, gearboxes, chain/sprockets, etc, made everything so expensive. A basic sonar sensor was $70! I could buy a pack of 6 for $5 on Amazon. However with proper budgeting, we made do. However money wasn’t the only resource we lacked. Our team operated in our school’s small auto shop. We had nothing more than a basic toolkit with hex keys, drills, wrenches, and zip-ties at our disposal. We did not have the cool 3D printers that the other teams had. Or tools to CNC out our own robot parts. Our main ball collection mechanism was made with a pipe we found that we drilled holes into and stuck rubber tubes into. Our robot looked like complete garbage compared to most. Nevertheless we pushed on and made it to the world competition.
Finishing thoughts
FTC was a wonderful experience that built friendships, real world engineering experience, and leadership skills. Not only does it allow young children to partake in a fun activity but teaches real world engineering experience. We learned so much about the proper engineering design process, fundraising, budgeting, management, etc. Through the much smarter teams at the world competition, I had learned how to incorporate Kalman filters and PIDs into a robot. FTC offers a wonderful learning experience that cannot be matched and I strongly encourage everyone to join a team. It isn’t difficult to start your own team and FIRST operates globally so practically anyone can start their own team. If you are an adult, go help mentor a team. It is always appreciated and a good mentor is worth more than gold.
Postscript
I have a brief experience with FRC. I joined an FRC team in my sophmore year however did not enjoy the experience (due to the local team not FRC itself). FRC opens a much greater opportunity at more advanced engineering. It requires more advanced programming and engineering and allows for more freedom in building your bot. This results in the ability to create much cooler robots with less technical restraints. If you have the money and engineering mentors to create/join an FRC team, I highly encourage it. You have the potential to learn and build more. But as stated earlier, FRC has a high barrier to entry and if it isn’t possible FTC hit’s that sweet spot in cost and challenge.