Robot Rock: the 2008 FIRST Robotics Championship 
by Andrew Kerr
May 2008

(Article follows this YouTube video.)



Google "first" and the venerable search engine's top recommendation will be the Foundation for the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology—better known by its "FIRST" acronym and most strongly associated with a series of robotics competitions held around the world throughout the year. The Super Bowl of these robotics championships was held in April at the Georgia Dome.

Over 10,000 students participated in this year's competition, which consisted of three different championships, the best known of which is the high school-level FIRST Robotics Competition Championship (this is the one that features the big robots that race around a track while throwing balls and creating all sorts of mayhem). Most of this article focuses on that.

To stage a robotics competition one obviously needs some sort of a playing field for the games themselves. But one also needs a place where things can be tested and busted-up robots can be fixed. This area was called "the pit."

In NASCAR a pit is a place where a car pulls over and receives servicing from a crew. The FIRST Robotics equivalent was located in the bowels of the Georgia World Congress Center (a building that faces the Georgia Dome). Here, on an industrial concrete floor, thousands of students and mentors tweaked their robots. Everyone in the pit is required to wear safety glasses, as a kindly Indiana student reminded me when he noticed my unshielded eyes studying some orange and metal contraption.

Broken chains, fried engines, and busted claws all get repaired in the pit. There is also a testing track, a replica of the official robot competition floor complete with the huge red and blue balls robots must manipulate in order to score points. While there was much activity tightening bolts and switching-out parts, there was also some down-time. I saw several students, no doubt worn-out by travel and their busy competition schedules, taking advantage of those rare moments by stealing quick naps; they dozed soundly while the violent crash of metal-on-metal resounded around them.

When I say those students were "worn out from travel," I should explain that the participants hailed from 25 countries (including India, China, and...just where are the Faroe Islands anyway?), not to mention most of the United States—including Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

To stray out onto the thin ice of political correctness, FIRST promotional materials clearly stress the international, multi-racial/gender aspects of the competition. Happily, the truth is not off the mark. There were indeed tons of girls at the competition, including some all-female teams. Predominantly African-American teams were also present. Mexico sent a team. The 24 non-U.S. participating countries added an exciting splash of international flavor (Egypt and Saudi Arabia were just as energized as their Western counterparts, and there were plenty of Muslim head-scarves on display—sometimes worn in tandem with team spirit-swaths of face-paint).

Team spirit is emphasized to a nearly insane level of ferventness, with FIRST teams frequently donning deliberately ridiculous costumes centered around that team's theme. This is all a part of the multi-disciplinary nature of the competition—during the school year, while the engineering students might focus on their robots, schools sometimes assign aspiring marketers and artists the task of crafting "the look" for their team. Costumes ranged from simple T-shirts to astronaut uniforms. A team from Florida went with a pink theme (flamingos)—all the team members sported garish pink wigs. One contingent wore hats topped with stuffed animal kiwi birds (Australians—though I might be confused because I thought New Zealanders were called "kiwis," but anyway). When regarding the assembled fans in the stands, you older folks might be reminded of the costumes worn by audience members on the "Let's Make a Deal" game show. The whole competition was like a pep rally in overdrive.

Since the pit is located at the Georgia World Congress Center, the robots have to then be wheeled over to the Georgia Dome to face competition. The sight of hundreds of robots and their handlers marching in a steady stream to and from the competition recalls ants on parade (an analogy reinforced by some teams' insect antennae headbands).

The following may be stating the obvious, but the obvious ought to be reinforced so that you can fully appreciate the significance of the FIRST Robotics Championship. The Georgia Dome is a real stadium. The Atlanta Falcons play at the Georgia Dome. Thus, there is an inescapable feeling when one strides out onto the Georgia Dome floor that this is "the big time." Announcers' voices boom, pop music pounds, and giant video screens offer an alternative view for the folks in the cheap seats. It's thrilling. If you have ever felt that intellectual achievement ought to be celebrated in the same manner in which we celebrate sports, you must come to the FIRST Robotics Championship and drink this all in.

Another sign of the "bigness" of the event was the impressive roster of guests in attendance. George H.W. Bush (the former president) spoke at the opening ceremonies, where he quipped that, "This is like WWF, but for smart people." (A quick-thinking FIRST Robotics team produced buttons commemorating the quote less than a day later: "FIRST: Like WWF, but for smart people—President George H.W. Bush.") The X-Prize group also enjoyed front-row seats at the competition finals, and Google co-founder Larry Page, who is a member of that group's board, was among those present. Feel free to revisit the opening sentence of this article and then connect the dots.

There are four playing fields spread around the Dome's floor upon which various teams face-off. Each of these playing fields is named after a famous scientist: Newton, Archimedes, Galileo, and Curie. On other days various parts of the floor are occupied by playing fields for other FIRST competitions, such as the LEGO League World Festival, a sort of mini-robotics championship for middle-schoolers (this competition has a particularly international bent to it; 24 countries are represented here versus 5 for the Robotics Championship). The Einstein field is not utilized until the finals, hence a sense of ascendance for the teams that win their playing fields' competitions. Apparently, Einstein remains top dawg amongst scientists.

To get a sense of how the competition itself works, please watch the YouTube video, as describing this in words is a nearly hopeless task. But I shall try anyway. Each competition track is a rectangle measuring 54' X 24'. The center of the track is spanned by a sort of bridge about six feet up in the air, upon which are placed four huge balls, two red and two blue. The precise placement of the balls is randomly determined before every competition. A blue team of robots squares off against a red team of robots. The robots' jobs are primarily to knock down the balls that correspond to their team color, then pick them up again. They score points either by catapulting the balls over the bridge (the most crowd-pleasing moment), placing the balls on the bridge (not so crowd-pleasing, but worth more points since this is harder to do), or simply completing a lap around the track carrying the ball. The first phase of a match finds the robots in "hybrid" mode, wherein they are basically on auto-pilot with some minor electronic signalling from the sidelines. The second and more thrilling phase finds each of the two sets of teams reaching for their joysticks in order to directly pilot the robots around the course. That is basically how it works.

Three teams work together in an alliance and face-off against another three-team alliance. In this sense the competition promotes teamwork (hence the trendy word "co-opetition" which was bandied about here and there by event organizers, though happily only sparingly).

The games are refereed, judged, and emceed. The booming voices of the emcees are an essential component to the experience; those guys really throw themselves into their work. In fact, one of them clearly had lost most of his voice by the end of the competition. That's what I call giving it your all.

As robots clashed on the field, the Georgia Dome DJs scored the action with peppy, pumping dance tunes (including Daft Punk's "Robot Rock," appropriately, plus a pounding, Eurotrashed-up version of Quad City DJ's "C'mon n' Ride the Train" that your correspondent is still searching for) interspersed with popular rock songs by such usual suspects as Nickelback. In the media gallery during the finals, I was impressed that the high school students seated around me were familiar with Crazy Frog's recorded output. But, as usual, I digress.

My propensity for turning all articles I write into something about me (e.g., did you know I'm a DJ?—bad journalism!) would no doubt disgust FIRST founder Dean Kamen, one of the most admirably selfless men I've ever had the pleasure of hearing speak. Mr. Kamen is an internationally renown inventor and entrepreneur (he played clips of a recent appearance on the "Colbert Report" for the audience's amusement). During the finals of the competition he spoke freely, his apparently unscripted words pouring from his own soul. He emphasized to an attentive audience of students, mentors, and parents that here the cliché "everyone is a winner" really is true. By competition's end there was little doubt that we had seen many of America's (and the world's) future best and brightest. Future Wikipedia articles discussing the superstars of science, mathematics, computing, and engineering will note several FIRST Robotics Championships in those biographies. Robots today, the stars tomorrow.