Robots, High Schools, and Goodwill

DMC was happy again to volunteer for a good cause with the FIRST Tech Challenge Robot competition here in Chicago.

This FTC event is the state/regional championship, where High School students bring their best ingenuity, collaboration, and teamwork for competition on the game field.

In the spirit of collaboration, two teams will form an alliance on the game field, where they will compete against two other teams of another alliance. This year’s game is “Get Over It!”. Alliances compete to cross a raised center goal and place items in various locations for points.

FIRST ("For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") is an organization founded to inspire students in engineering and technology. We teamed up with our partner National Instruments and a few other good-intentioned companies to volunteer at the two day event held at IIT. More than 30 teams competed this year from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

We had a great time helping out students with testing, programming, and repairing their robots as needed, both in pre-match prep and throughout the day.

"Get Over It!" game description:

“Using a combination of sensors, including infrared tracking (IR), line following, magnet seeking, ultrasonic, touch, and more, students will program their robots to operate in both autonomous and tele-operated modes over a raised center goal. GET OVER IT! matches will last two minutes and 40 seconds, and will begin with a 40-second autonomous period followed by a two-minute tele-operated period. The final 30 seconds of the tele-operated period is the "end game" where teams can only make contact with their own bridge and will try to get their robots and goal on top of the bridges to get balance points.”