In 2015 I was in the robotics team for Kamehameha and we had to build a robot for an FRC competition. I was one of the programmers for the team. Before the competition we spent our time studying the programming behind the robot and building practice robots that we used to test our programs and motors. For the FRC competition, teams must build a robot to satisfy the conditions of a given challenge. The challenge is not known until the very start of the competition and it changes every year. When the competition starts, you must finish building the robot until a certain time, then no more changes can be made to the robot.
For my team, we split up into different groups to accomplish the task. Some people went to building the physical robot, while others were designing and thinking, documenting, and programming. This way each group can focus on one thing that we need to do.
The programing software we used was Labview. I thought Labview was pretty cool and it made the progamming easier for those who didn’t know how to write code themselves. Labview had many different tools that we had to learn how to do, so we spent a lot of our time researching online what each thing did. Most of the programming we did was to affect the motors that were used to move the robot and various parts.
The competition was at the Stan Sheriff Center and schools from all over the nation, and some from Asia, came to compete. The competition has an autonomous stage where the robot does things automatically and a non-autonomous stage where we control the robot. More points can be gained in the autonomous stage for doing whatever task for that year.
This competition was a great place to meet new people and get connected. Even though we didn’t win that year, I still learned a lot from the loss and I will work to improve in the future.
You can learn more at the FRC Website.