Congratulations to Barn2 Robotics!

Sunday April 3, 2011

As wild a ride as my first week at Google was, the real thrill was the FIRST Silicon Valley Robotics Competition held at San Jose State University Thursday through Saturday of the week. I've been one of the folks mentoring the team from the Woodside Priory School. My youngest daughter attends the school, but she isn't old enough for the robotics team - although she has competed in the FIRST Lego League. I skipped out of work for a few hours on Friday to be with the kids. I took some photos and videos of the team, robots and three of the rounds. The did so well that they ended up on the winning alliance, and so are going to the national championships in St Louis. One of their robot's real strengths was its performance during the autonomous part of each round. Of the three I watched, it performed perfectly each time, which was fantastic. Each round has an initial period of time where the robot has to drive itself autonomously, then it's controlled by the students remotely.

Several years ago a group at Sun (driven by Eric Arseneau - thanks Eric!) worked with the folks at FIRST and WPI to port the Squawk VM (the VM used in the SunSPOT) to the Compact RIO from National Instruments, the industrial automation controller used by the FIRST Robotics League. In prior years, programming this controller was freakishly hard, so the students rarely took advantage of the ability to do any programming. Between the ability to code in Java, and the tool support through NetBeans (breakpoints in a real robot, how cool is that???), the RIO becomes really easy to program, and hence capable of much more sophisticated algorithms.

I loved watching the kids design, build, and program their robot. The software team hardly needed any help from me. They were great.

Comments[5]

Comments:

Thank you James :) I'd like to make sure that Dereke White, still at Oracle, Roger Meike now at RIM, and Brad Miller still at WPI get the cusps as well. I think FIRST is great, and if you know nothing about the program, find out about it ASAP.

Posted by Eric Arseneau on April 04, 2011 at 01:17 AM PDT #

Oops, typo, cusps should be cudos, thank you auto correct :)

Posted by Eric Arseneau on April 04, 2011 at 01:18 AM PDT #

i disagree about difficulty programming FIRST robots without Java. there was and there is NI's visual programming tool, and many teams use it, including my son's.

Posted by argyn on April 05, 2011 at 05:02 PM PDT #

FIRST team 3686 the Robo-Turkeys from St. Mary's Episcopal Girls School, Memphis, TN used the NetBeans IDE and Java to program their robot. Team 3686 was the only team at the Saint Louis Regional that I heard about that used Java. Most teams use LabView G programming language and IDE. One team did use C++ and developed an elaborate 3D joy stick to control a robotic arm to place the game tubes on the scoring pegs. That was a very interesting design although the mechanical elements of their robotic arm caused them the most problems. The robot control system incorporated a gryoscope and compass to keep the robot automatically aligned with the scoring wall and would automatically re-align itself if bumped or pushed. This team won the design award.

Posted by Don O'Brien on April 06, 2011 at 07:10 AM PDT #

I'm glad to hear the team had great success with Java on their robot. Maybe I'll see you at Championship again - I'll be the guy in the Java hat :-)

Posted by Derek White on April 07, 2011 at 03:05 PM PDT #

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