Servo - January 2012

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Looking Backward: 2012-1989

TEAM 1079, CIRCA 2003.

The beginning of a new year is always an exciting time. Fresh resolutions are still unbroken, the hectic hubbub of the holidays is subsiding, and perhaps most importantly a new season of the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is kicking off. January is the time when teams of intrepid high school students, nay, roboticists, gather for the unveiling of a devilishly clever game that will monopolize their brainpower for the next six weeks. The anticipation of such an unveiling rivals and perhaps even eclipses the delight of descending upon the gifts under the Christmas tree mere weeks earlier.

It doesn’t seem like that long ago when in 2003, rookie Team 1079 began churning out ideas in a brain thunderstorm after the game Stack Attack was revealed. Now that it’s been a few years since our days as FIRST rookies (and many years since the founding of the FIRST Robotics Competition in 1989), we can really assess what kind of impact it’s had on our educational and career paths. We also reached out to some of the folks at LARobotics to get a sense of how the FIRST program has evolved over the years, and what rookie roboticists taking their FIRST steps can expect for the future.

First FIRST Steps

The first major challenge for any FIRST team is deciding to take the plunge in the first place. A major component of this initial obstacle is a crisis of confidence of sorts. Robots by their nature are pretty intimidating. The popular image of robots as the urbane C-3PO or the deadly Terminator have perpetuated the idea that robots are inevitably extremely complicated; something reserved for PhDs, mad scientists, or the near future when we’ll also be consuming all of our meals in pill form as we fly around on jetpacks. Granted, things like Roomba and LEGO Mindstorms have helped to dispel that illusion a little bit, but for many, robotics is an enigmatic and daunting field.

This obstacle affects established teams and prospective teams alike. For established teams, potential new team members can see the success of their classmates, but the lingering doubts about “Yeah that’s cool, but could I do that?” still remain. This was definitely a challenge for Team 1079 in later years. For completely new teams, this difficulty is even more pronounced. Prospective team members don’t have the robots of