Monthly Archives: February 2017

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international high school robotics competition. Each year, teams of high school students and mentors work during a six-week period to build game-playing robots that weigh up to 120 pounds (54kg).[6] Robots complete tasks such as scoring balls into goals, flying discs into goals, inner tubes onto racks, hanging on bars, and balancing robots on balance beams. The game changes yearly, keeping the excitement fresh and giving each team a more level playing field. While teams are given a standard set of parts, they are also allowed a budget and encouraged to buy or make specialized parts. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is one of four robotics competition programs organized by FIRST, the other three being FIRST Lego League Jr. (Jr. FLL), FIRST Lego League (FLL), and the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC).

FRC has a unique culture, built around two values. Gracious Professionalism embraces the competition inherent in the program, but rejects trash talk and chest-thumping, instead embracing empathy and respect for other teams. Coopertition emphasizes that teams can cooperate and compete at the same time.[7] The goal of the program is to inspire students to be science and technology leaders.

In 2016, the 25th year of competition, 3128 teams with roughly 75,000 students and 19,000 mentors from 24 countries built robots. They competed in 53 Regional Competitions, 65 District Qualifying Competitions, and 8 District Championships.[3] 600 teams won slots to attend the FIRST Championship, where they competed in a tournament. In addition to on-field competition, teams and team members competed for awards recognizing entrepreneurship, creativity, engineering, industrial design, safety, controls, media, quality, and exemplifying the core values of the program.

Most teams reside in the United States, with Canada, Israel, and Mexico contributing significant numbers of teams.[3]

FIRST was founded in 1989 by inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, with inspiration and assistance from physicist and MIT professor emeritus Woodie Flowers. Kamen was disappointed with the number of kidsparticularly women and minoritieswho considered science and technology careers, and decided to do something about it. As an inventor, he looked for activities that captured the enthusiasm of students, and decided that combining the excitement of sports competition with science and technology had potential.

Distilling what sports had done right into a recipe for engaging young people, Kamen says, turned out to be relatively straightforward. "It's after school, not in school. It's aspirational, not required," he explained to me.

"You don't get quizzes and tests, you go into competitions and get trophies and letters. You don't have teachers, you have coaches. You nurture, you don't judge. You create teamwork between all the participants. We justify sports for teamwork but why, when we do it in the classroom, do we call it cheating?"

Kamen has stated that FIRST is the invention he feels most proud of, and predicts that participants will be responsible for significant technological advances in years to come.[9] The first FRC season was in 1992 and had one event at a high school gymnasium in New Hampshire.[10] That first competition was relatively small-scale, similar in size to today's FIRST Tech Challenge and Vex Robotics Competition games. Robots relied on a wired connection to receive data from drivers; in the following year, it quickly transitioned to a wireless system.[11][12]

Countries currently represented (in decreasing order of number of teams, as of 2016)[3]

The FIRST Championship is the culmination of the FRC competition season, and occurs in late April each year. Roughly 600 teams participated in 2015. On May 5th, 2016, FIRST announced that from the 2017 season and onward, there would be two FIRST Championships. One for the Northeast taking place in St.Louis MO, and one for the Southwest taking place in Houston TX.[13]

The 2017 & 2018 Geographical Assignment Map can be seen here...[13]

From 1996 to 1998, the FIRST Championship was covered by ESPN.[14] Live coverage is currently provided by NASA TV, which can be viewed on the internet, TVRO, DirecTV, and Dish Network; the sophistication of the broadcast of each event is dependent on the organizers of that event, and range from professionally called with color commentary, such as the 2011 Michigan State Championship, to single-camera setups with no commentary other than the on-field play caller.

The PBS documentary "Gearing Up" followed four teams through the 2008 season.[15]

In the television series Dean of Invention, Dean Kamen made appeals promoting FIRST prior to commercial breaks.[16]

During the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition season, FIRST team 3132, Thunder Down Under, was followed by a Macquarie University student film crew to document the first year of FRC in Australia. The crew produced a documentary film called I, Wombot.[17][18] The film premiered during the 2011 Dungog Film Festival.[19][20]

A book called The New Cool was written by Neal Bascomb about the story of Team 1717 from Goleta, California as they competed in the 2009 game season. A movie adaptation directed by Michael Bacall is being produced.[21]

The CNN documentary "Don't Fail Me: Education in America", which aired on 15 May 2011, followed three FRC teams during the 2011 season. The documentary profiled one student from each team, covering different geographic and socioeconomic levels: Shaan Patel from Team 1403 Cougar Robotics, Maria Castro from Team 842 Falcon Robotics, and Brian Whited from Team 3675 Eagletrons.[22]

On 14 August 2011, ABC aired a special on FIRST called "i.am FIRST: Science is Rock and Roll"[23] that featured many famous musical artists such as The Black Eyed Peas and Willow Smith. will.i.am himself was the executive producer of the special. The program placed a special focus on the FIRST Robotics competition, even though it included segments on the FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST Lego League, and Junior FIRST Lego League.[citation needed]

The movie 'Drive Like A Girl' followed the Bronx High School of Science's all girls robot team the Fe Maidens

For the 2013 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, five FRC teams and their robots led the parade, with one robot cutting the ribbon and the others shooting confetti.[24][25]

In the 2014 movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, a FRC Robot built by Team 2468, Team Appreciate, for the 2012 Season was featured in Cade Yeager's garage shooting the foam basketball game pieces from Rebound Rumble.[26]

The 2015 Kickoff was, for the first time, broadcast by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast, and was available via OnDemand for the month of January 2015.[27]

The fourth season of The Fosters (2013 TV series) had several episodes featuring characters competing in a regional FRC competition, most notably episode 8 "Girl Code".[28]

Older logo from website (until 2015)

Intermission during Aim High in Los Angeles, encouraging teams to socialize

The 2006 Triplets of 1114, 1503, and 1680. 1114 and 1503 won 3 regionals each, while 1680 won a silver finalist medal and was a quarterfinalist twice.

Competition at the 2008 Hawaii regionals.

"Barrage", Team 254's 2014 World Champion FRC robot

Read more:

FIRST Robotics Competition - Wikipedia

Image: Agility Robotics via YouTube Cassie is a dynamic bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics, which says it could be used for research, disaster relief, and, long term, delivery of packages.

Today, Agility Robotics, a spin-off of Oregon State University, is officially announcing a shiny new bipedal robot named Cassie. Cassie is a dynamic walker, meaning that it walks much more like humans do than most of the carefully plodding bipedal robots were used to seeing. This makes it better at handling the kind of diverse and complex terrain that we walk over all the time without even thinking, a talent thats going to be mandatory for robots that want to tackle the different environments and situations that theyll need to master to be actually useful around people.

In addition to search-and-rescue and disaster relief, Agility Robotics has one particular environment and situation in mind: They want Cassie to be scampering up your steps to deliver packages to your front door.

Cassie is just three months old in this video, which, if you consider the typical pace for teaching a bipedal robot that you designed from the ground up from scratch to walk without constantly falling over, is quite frankly astonishing. As you can see in the video, theyre not being shy with what they ask Cassie to do: Its on dirt, its on grass, its balancing on a wobbly dock surrounded by an alarming amount of water, its even standing outside in the rain, which is an important feature for any robot that spends much time in Oregon.

And if Cassie looks a bit more like an ostrich than a human, it wasnt because Agility Robotics was specifically trying for an ostrich-like robot: They dont want to necessarily mimic the morphology of animals, although they do study animal behavior and dynamicsfor inspiration and insights. So while ground-running birds may have had the idea first, Agility Robotics intelligently designed Cassie to be agile, efficient, and robust, and this is the leg that they came up with.

Agility Robotics may be a new company, but its made up of the folks behind the ATRIAS robots, including MARLO at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Cassie is the next-generation robot thats intended to take everything that was learned from the ATRIAS project and build it into a platform thats both more capableand more practical, as Agility Robotics co-founder (and OSU professor) Jonathan Hurst tells us:

There were many, many unknowns in the design of ATRIAS. ATRIAS was the first machine to demonstrate human-like gait dynamics and implement spring-mass walking [reproducingthe ground reaction forces and center-of-mass motion of human walking], but it wasnot a practical machine for any use other than science demonstration.

We learned a few key things with ATRIAS: First, the legs on ATRIAS are configured as a 4-bar linkage, in part to create minimum inertia for the spring-mass model embodiment. However, the configuration results in one motor acting as a brake on the other, with a lot of power cycling internally between motors rather than doing work on the world. After some analysis, we developed the specific leg configuration of Cassie. This allows the motors to be smaller, and the robot to be far more efficient than even ATRIAS was.

In addition to increased efficiency, Cassie has all kinds of other practical improvements over ATRIAS. It has a 3-degrees-of-freedom hip like humans do, allowing the robot to move its legs forward and backward, side to side, and also rotate them at the same time. This makes Cassie steerable in a way that ATRIAS wasnt. It also has powered ankles, which it uses to stand in place without having to constantly move its feet the way ATRIAS does, and it has enough battery power to run some beefy on-board computers, meaning that integrated perception is now an option.

University of Michigan engineering professorJessyGrizzle, who wrangles the ATRIAS robot named MARLO at the Dynamic Legged Locomotion Lab, is getting one of the first Cassie robots, and both he (and his students, who have the thankless job of making sure that MARLO doesnt faceplant during their outdoor tests) are particularly excited about how durable Cassie is. Cassie is tough, Grizzle tells us. Its designed for the rough and tumble life of an experimental robot. In principle, we should not have to use a safety gantry of any kind. This will allow us to take the robot into wild places.

Meanwhile, Agility Robotics is already looking beyond research towards commercial applications for Cassie, Hurst tells us:

If we really understood how to implement dynamically capable legs, there would be so many applications for them, including search-and-rescue, exoskeletons, powered prosthetic limbs, and package delivery.

I believe legged locomotion is going to be analogous to the automotive industry, in terms of size and how it transforms our society. We all want telepresence robots; we all want robots that can help us in our homes. We all want groceries and other goods delivered to our homes on a moments notice and for insignificant cost. We all want the cost of manufactured goods to be significantly reduced through more efficient logistics throughout the manufacturing process. Cassie is a step in this direction: it is a first product that will initially be sold to research institutions to support a community of researchers solving the problem of locomotion in the human environment, and Cassie will continue to improve and evolve, as Agility Robotics focuses on products and commercial customers.

Hurst tells us that arms and sensors are coming soon, which will enable Cassie to get up by itself after a fall, and theyre also working on VR-style telepresence. In terms of cost, Agility Robotics wouldnt disclose specific numbers, saying only that theirgoal is to end up with sub-$100k robots.

The company says the initial Cassie production run is already completely sold out, but if you want one to play with, more will be available later in the summer. As far as using Cassie to deliver packages, its a compelling idea, and we can see the benefits: In a world where so much of our spacesare designed around bipedal mobility, a bipedal robot could become the easiest and most reliable platform to do anything practical. Cassie has some work to do before its ready to be hauling groceries up stairs for you, but were very much looking forward to watching this robot taking more steps toward robust and dynamic legged locomotion.

[ Agility Robotics ]

IEEE Spectrum's award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org

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Capacitor-powered water-cooled motors make this humanoid superstrong 10Apr2013

MARLO has fallen over more times than any legged robot weve ever seen, but it won't give up 3Aug2016

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The founder of Boston Dynamics describes how his team built one of the most advanced humanoids ever 24Feb2016

Watch this bipedal robot get attacked by vicious dodgeball-loving researchers 12Mar2015

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Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos 27Jan

R&D lab Draper is using genetic engineering and optoelectronics to build cybernetic insects 25Jan

This factory robot can be trusted not to kill itshumancoworkers 29Dec2016

3DSignals' deep learning AI can detect early sounds of trouble in cars and other machines before they break down 27Dec2016

Exclusive photos take you through the first mission of Stanford's diving robot 21Dec2016

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Agility Robotics Introduces Cassie, a Dynamic and Talented Robot ... - IEEE Spectrum

While Boston suffers through its first real snow day of the year, I wanted to update you on Robo Madness: A.I. Gets Real.

Were mapping out the program for our March 28 conference at Google in Kendall Square (looking forward to that spring weather). This will be our annual convention of robotics and artificial intelligence experts, startups and investors, and other business and tech leaders. Im pleased to say weve confirmed some new speakers:

Helen Greiner, founder and CTO of CyPhy Works, a prominent drone company. (Greiner is also a co-founder of iRobot.)

Richard Waters, CEO of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. They are working on self-driving technology, computer vision, and other A.I.-related projects.

Carl Vause, CEO of Soft Robotics. This is an intriguing startup that makes new kinds of grippers and control systems (demo alert).

Carmichael Roberts, general partner from North Bridge Venture Partners. Hes a materials and hardware expert whos plugged into robotics.

Rudina Seseri, managing partner at Glasswing Ventures. Shes diving deep into the market opportunities for A.I.-related companies and products.

They join our all-star cast, which includes Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research; Jeremy Wertheimer from Google; Semyon Dukach from Techstars; Tom Ryden from MassRobotics; Max Versace of Neurala; Joshua Feast from Cogito; Slater Victoroff from Indico; and many more.

Well have much more about the program soonget ready for some outstanding demos and hot-button discussions. Tickets have been flying out the door, but you can still grab one here while supplies last. See you all on March 28.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

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CyPhy, Mitsubishi, and Soft Robotics Join Robo Madness on March 28 - Xconomy