Robots play football at FIRST Boston

Last weekend, more than 50 teams from the Northeast United States and three countries presented home-made robots to participate in the FIRST Boston Regional Robotics Competition.


FIRST was founded in 1989 by Segway inventor Dean Kamen. This year, robots are playing football. On a field measuring 27 by 54 feet (8.3 m by 16.5 m) there are several goal balls and various obstacles.

Six teams competed in each round - three in the red group and three in the blue. The groups worked together to score more points. The first 15 seconds of each round were independent, i.e. robots functioned without human intervention. For the remaining two minutes, the students, controlling the robots, tried to score goals. In the last seconds of each round, robots tried to hang over the field. Each goal scored brought one point, each robot hovering over the field at the end of the round, brought two points and if the robot was hung by another robot, the group received three points.
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In January, students received a set of parts and used them to assemble their own unique robots. In total, the development was given 6 weeks. In addition to soldering and assembling parts, they were involved in creating the software necessary for the 15-second autonomous part of each match. After the control returned, participants used joysticks and laptops to directly control the robots. They also needed to determine the position of the robots and control the mechanisms of their legs.

“We’re all really involved in making a robot,” says Blake Bork of the Infinite Loop team, Auckland. Being in a team for four years, he says that he likes to help younger students understand "how this crap works with that crap and the rest of the stuffing."

Mark Hodosh, chairman of the FIRST Boston branch, says that one of the goals of the competition is students' natural interest in science and technology, which allows the United States to remain competitive with the rest of the world. “We need engineers, we need scientists — much more, athletes or artists.”

Institutional teams usually consult with a teacher, but they are also assisted by full-time engineers from large companies, many of which are sponsors of teams.

The atmosphere of the competition was very lively: with pop music playing in the arena and shouts when the robot scores. The teams even have talismans - one in a suit of an eagle the size of a man was hanging around the floor. The team in which plays Shattak from Techno-Nuts, wore large soft bolts on their heads.

“I like it because I'm a geek and I really get the hang of this engineering thing,” says Blair Lichtenstein from the Robo-Rebels team. “It teaches you a lot that you don’t learn in school.”
Five teams from the Boston Regional Competition will enter the FIRST Championship in Atlanta on April 15-17.