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Posts Tagged ‘robots’
Live from the FIRST Regional Competition: Some Go To Atlanta, Some Go Home
On Sunday at New York’s Javits Center, hundreds of teens gathered to compete in the finals of the FIRST Robotics Competition regionals. The winners will go on to the National Competition in Atlanta—for the rest, this competition was the end of the assembly line.
On the track, the competition was fierce and students eyed each others’ handiwork warily. But behind the scenes in the pit, where goggle-clad kids wielded screwdrivers and tinkered with their machines, the students shared their knowledge with each other, with experienced groups often lending a hand to first-timers. The Capri-Sun flowed freely.
Live from FIRST Regional Competition: Robot Action Photos
Robots burned rubber in the ring today at the Javit’s Center for the regional championship of FIRST (An acronym DISCOVER can get behind: “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”). Keep checking in on Discoblog for a full recap of the event. For now, here is a recap in photos of the innovation, competition, and robotic mayhem that took place today among high schoolers and engineers showing off their circuitry skills.
There are three objects in this game: 1) Be quick—the more laps, the more points 2) Knock down balls. 3) Pick the balls back up and place them on top of the bars or shoot them over.
Live from the Javits Center: Students and Robots Race for the Prize
Over one thousand high school students scurry around 64 robots along about the floor of the Javits Center in New York City. They are here to compete in the NYC regional contest to prove they have what it takes to put together the fittest, most agile, robot to rule them all. In this year’s competition the students, with the help of their teachers and outside engineers, designed robots that will fight—well, let’s say “compete”—to move on to the nationals (and get a shot at scholarship money) in a game of Overdrive.
The goal is simple: two teams of three robots each race around a 1500-square foot track, earning points for successfully completing each lap. On top of this teams can get points for manipulating huge red and blue balls that sit atop a 6-ft-plus scaffold in the middle of the track. The robots get 6 points for bringing the balls down and 8 points if they can hoist them back up.
Killer Military Robots Gaining Independence
Robots build our cars, milk our cows, perform unassisted heart surgery, and, at least in Japan, take care of both the young and the old. Advances in robot technology in the home and workplace are impressive, but the best droids around (on our planet, at least) are out on the battlefield. For years, robotic soldiers have played considerable roles in performing the military’s most undesirable tasks: destroying and placing explosives, performing reconnaissance, and detecting and cleaning nuclear and biological agents—basically everything that gets left out when kids “play war.”
