Event 3: First Robotics Competition World Robotics Championships

During Week 3, which happened to be during our Robotics and Art unit, I went to the First Robotics Competition’s World Robotics Championships in Houston, Texas to cheer on my brother’s robotics team. The competition was a true representation of how Kelly describes the third culture – art and science coming together for each team to create their masterpiece, filled with the “nerd” culture he describes, but in the best way (Kelly).

The robots were designed to be able to play a specific “game,” in which they had to be able to lift cubes onto elevated surfaces to gain points, as well as climb about 2 feet into the air. For the first 30 seconds of the match, the robot had to move autonomously, based on computer coding done by the students. A driver was then allowed to use a remote control to drive the robot around the field, scoring as many points as possible. Robots were designed with various types of claw-like features to grab cubes, “elevators” or arms to place the cubes on high or low surfaces, and a number of climbing apparatuses used to hoist themselves into the air.

A couple of unique pits

Despite great detail being placed into the functionality of each robot, the teams also decorated their “pit” areas, where they had space to fix their robot between matches and the robots themselves to represent their team. For example, my brother’s robot was painted gold to reflect their school colors, while other robots were adorned with flashing LED lights or pictures of the team icon. Benjamin would not mind the way that these robots are created and decorated, because each is very unique to the team that built it, with no two robots being copies of each other (Benjamin). Though some robots held similarities in types of wheels, climbing apparatuses, or cube intakes, each robot had a different combination of systems they thought were best (and at any given time, any of these systems may have been broken, adding to the competitive, creative atmosphere). At any given time, a team’s pit may have resembled a Ford assembly line, with one student milling a new part to replace one that broke, while others attached new parts or ran through readiness checklists to ensure that the robot was operating as well as possible (Vesna).

The field of play was decorated in a “video game” theme, and teams adapted this theme into their pits and robots as well. The students themselves dressed in all sorts of costumes and team attire – some teams had mascots, while others had exciting hats. My personal favorite was the team who all had crazy hairstyles, spray-painted green to represent their school. The air of the championship was competitive, but due to First’s value of “Coopertition,” a mixture of cooperation and competition, teams were very friendly and willing to help one another when parts broke or tools needed to be borrowed. This collaborative, constructive environment allowed for better robots to be created as students learned from different teams and got perspectives on how robotics is done in different parts of the world.

Me in front of my brother's pit at World Championships (he is bending over)

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Reading Images, 2001, pp. 62–75., doi:10.1007/978-1-137-08886-4_7. 

Kelly, Kevin. "The third culture." Science 279.5353 (1998): 992-993.

Vesna, Victoria, director. Robotics pt3. YouTube, 16 Apr. 2012, youtu.be/wkP7oSZVkbg.