FIRST promotion video

This is a nice video summarizing the idea behind FIRST. The video features actor Morgan Freeman, FIRST founder Dean Kamen and president Obama.

Power Surge Robot

Sorry for the delay with this post... I've been busy discovering just how much time it can take to prepare for college placement exams and Calculus AP tests. :-)

Here's a video that shows the capabilities of Power Surge's robot, "Spike". BTW, Spike is a reference to a voltage spike, which is another name for a power surge. The video shows what Spike can do in autonomous mode as well as tele-op (driver control) mode:

One of the robot components shown in the video that might not be as well known as other parts of the robot is our Intake System, or our mechanism for retrieving pucks off the floor. At the regionals, we had an intake system that could get one puck at a time, and that required quite a bit of accuracy on the part of the driver. Also, the puck had to be on a flat area. This made it slow and unreliable for us to get pucks off the floor in matches. In preparation for Atlanta, we wanted to improve our intake system, since we thought opponents would probably dump our pucks on the floor early in the match to try to prevent us from scoring them. We came up with an design - somewhat similar to a vacuum cleaner - that works really well. A rotating turbine with flexible brushes sweeps pucks into the robot. Then the same turbine rotates and lifts the puck onto vertical conveyor belts (made with LEGOs and non-slip pad), which lift the puck over 17 inches off the ground before dropping it into our big Puck Magazine with the rest of the pucks. The whole thing is done with just three NXT motors. It can retrieve pucks from almost anywhere on the mat: obstacle strips, up against field walls, etc. In addition, the mouth of the Intake System is 8 inches wide, so the driver doesn't need to be accurate at all; he can simply drive the robot over a puck in roughly the right place and the robot will take care of the rest.

Below are videos of the autonomous and driver-control modes of our 5th qualifying match. We're on the blue alliance, and our drivers have yellow shirts (one of them is me). We won this match 222 - 208. This was the highest individual score (222), as well as the highest combined score (430) at the World Championships. We used our autonomous mode that scored two puck racks for the first time in this match and it worked flawlessy, putting all 18 pucks into the triangular goal. It turned out to be a good thing that we did this, because a team on the opposing alliance also used a two puck rack-autonomous mode for their first time, and their partner also scored a couple pucks in autonomous mode.

Driver control was a little stressful for our fans. I was the primary driver, but neither the on-field coach nor myself had noticed that our opponents scored so much in autonomous mode. So in driver control period, we focused on scoring lots of our opponents' pucks to obtain ranking points and overtake the #1 team in the rankings (see my previous post about FTC). However, it ended up being better for us, because we still won the match, plus we got a lot of ranking points and took over the #1 spot.

You can see more information and pictures from the World Championships on my team's website: http://www.teampowersurge.org/

-Jonathan

FTC World Championships #2 - How the Game Works

I'm waiting on some videos to post more about the FTC World Championships and our robot, but in the meantime you can see a video our team put together of our experience at the competition here.

I also thought I'd post a description of this year's game so that readers can understand what's going on in the videos. You can click here to see an animation from FIRST that explains how the game works.

At a tournament, teams first participate in several qualifying matches. During each qualifying match, two randomly selected teams ally with each other against two other randomly selected teams. The two winning teams gain 2 qualifying points, while the two losing teams don't gain any. After the qualifying rounds, the team with the most qualifying points is ranked #1, and so on. But what happens if multiple teams have the same number of qualifying points? In this case, a somewhat-confusing tiebreaker is used. After each qualifying match, the four participating teams recieve the score of the losing alliance as ranking points. So if one alliance scored 130 points in a match and the other scored 95 points, all four teams in the match would recieve 95 ranking points, the score of the losing alliance. Then, if two teams have the same number of qualifying points, the team with the most ranking points takes precedence. For example, in Atlanta, Power Surge won all six of our qualifying matches, thus gaining the maximum number of qualifying points. However, there were three other teams who also won all their qualifying matches. But since we had the most ranking points, we were still ranked #1.

After the qualifying matches are over, a certain number of the top teams advance to the elimination rounds, where the winners are determined. At the World Championships this year, the top four teams in each division advanced. Each of these teams (called the alliance captains) pick two alliance partners to form a permanent alliance in the elimination rounds. The #1-ranked team picks an alliance partner first, then the #2-ranked team, and so on. Then they start over, with the #1-ranked team picking their second alliance partner and so on until there are four alliances composed of three teams each: the alliance captain and two teams they selected.

These alliances then compete with each other in a series of semifinals and finals. In each elimination match, alliances send two of their three teams to compete. In the semifinals, the #1-ranked team's alliance goes up against the #4-ranked team's alliance, and the #2-ranked team's alliance goes against the #3-ranked team's alliance. The two alliances which win at least 2/3 matches against their opponents advance to the finals, where they compete against each other. The alliance which wins 2/3 matches in the finals is the winner. At the World Championships, there were two divisions this year, each of which had their own elimination matches. So after the elimination rounds were completed in each division, the two winners of the divisions went up against each other for the overall finals.

Wow, long post... it's pretty simple, isn't it? :-)

-Jonathan

FTC World Championships

Power Surge had a great time competing at the FTC World Championships this year. Congratulations to the teams on the winning alliance: the RoboRaiders, Longhorns, and Jr. Bomb Squad! My team was ranked #1 in our division after winning all of our qualifying rounds, and made the highest score in both divisions (222). In the elimination rounds, we made it to the finals in our division (Edison), but a strange problem hit our robot and kept us from winning them. I'll be making some posts later on with pictures and videos of the event and of our robot.

-Jonathan

FIRST World Championship

The FIRST Championship event, held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, GA, is coming right up. The FRC Championships, FTC World Championships, and FLL World Festival will all be held there during April 16-18. You can find more information about the event on FIRST's website, here.

My FTC team, 2945 Power Surge, has been very busy for the past several weeks preparing for the FTC World Championships, and we're finishing up the final preparations on our robot, team shirts, pit banner, etc. We hope to see you there!

-Jonathan

http://www.teampowersurge.org/

FTC NJ State Championship

Power Surge competed at the FTC NJ State Championship tournament on Saturday... another really fun event! 37 teams competed in the tournament. We won all our matches again, and recieved the Winning Alliance award with our alliance partners 121 Rhode Rage and 248 "P J FTC #2." We also recieved the Innovate award. The Inspire award was given to team "Techno Chix".

Congratulations to all the winners!

-Jonathan

FTC Delaware Regional, Part 2

EDIT: You can see videos of our robot that Ken Johnson posted on the FTC blog, here.

Like I posted about earlier, the FTC Delaware Regional Tournament was held on Saturday. What an exciting event! It was held in conjunction with both the FLL and JFLL Delaware State Championship, so it was a pretty major event with lots of teams and spectators.

Speaking of FLL, I was realizing at the tournament that I've now seen FLL from three totally different perspectives: as a team competing in it, as a referee, and now as an outsider looking in. It was interesting to see how vastly different these perspectives are, and it's also something that's good to keep in mind when one is refereeing or competing.

2945 Power Surge had a lot of fun competing and watching other teams compete. Our robot performed way beyond our expectations; we won all 11 of our matches, and recieved the Winning Alliance Award (equivalent to FLL's 1st Place Robot Performance) with our alliance partners 3165 Twisted Bots 2 and 7 Techbrick, and the Inspire Award (equivalent to FLL's Champion's Award). Our highest score in a single match was 213, in which we scored all of our alliance's points; no other alliance got higher than 100 points, and we broke the highest known record, 166 points. The second place alliance was composed of 134 R.A.T.S., 404 Charter Impulse, and 395 RoboAuks... congratulations to them and all the winning teams!

Here's a few pictures of the event:

Some of the audience... there were many people there!

Working on the robot before the matches... we had to do a good bit of tweaking to make the robot work with the competition fields (which were somewhat different than our practice field).

The tournament supplied a nice LEGO "brickbox" (instead of a sandbox) for the little ones to play with when they got a little bored. :-)

#2945 Power Surge with our robot and trophies. From left to right: Kevin, Phyllis, Chase, myself, Isaac, Timothy, and Kathleen.

The tournament was a really fun experience for us, and we're looking forward to our next regional in NJ next Saturday.

As always, you can learn more about the team at our website: http://www.teampowersurge.org/.

-Jonathan

FTC Delaware Regional Tournament

Team #2945 Power Surge, my FTC team, has been in high gear for the past several weeks preparing for our first regional (state) tournament, which is going to be held in Delaware tomorrow, 1/31. We've had a good amount of time to vastly improve our robot since our first scrimmage, and we're looking forward to an exciting competition. I'll be sure to post all about the tournament after it's over.

-Jonathan

P.S. You can learn more about the team and see pictures and a video at our website, http://www.teampowersurge.org/

And in the FTC world...

...things are going well. Power Surge competed at its first scrimmage and its alliance came in second. It was a lot of fun; the aspect of having four big, powerful robots all in the same field competing with each other made it very exciting! Now we're working on improving our robot for the state regionals coming up. We've also put up a team website at http://www.teampowersurge.org/.

-Jonathan

Using the NXT in FTC

Now that the FTC season has gotten underway and my team has been working on our robot, I've gotten a chance to work with the TETRIX pieces and to use the NXT and other LEGOs with them. The TETRIX system is really nice... it opens up so many possibilities with the NXT system. However, I like to think of it as a sort of "block building" system compared to the NXT. It doesn't have a very wide variety of parts, and most of those parts aren't very small pieces useful for making detailed mechanisms. This makes LEGOs very useful when you need a complicated design in the robot. The big, ultra-strong TETRIX metal is great for the framework and simple, powerful mechanisms, while the NXT pieces are helpful when you need something complex. We've already found a use for NXT pieces in one of our robot's modules, and I was really glad to have had experience with the NXT beforehand. If anyone out there is looking to join an FTC team, your skill with LEGO MINDSTORMS could be very helpful.

One of the main differences I've found between using the NXT for FTC and my other projects is the need to make it work with non-LEGO objects. Our LEGO mechanism had to work with hockey pucks, which weren't designed to fit exactly with LEGO pieces. It's a neat challenge trying to work around this.

-Jonathan