This past Saturday Dean Kamen’s hugely successful FIRST robotics competition launched its annual kickoff party to hoards of excited high school students, teachers, and sponsors across the globe. Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), in 1989 as a robotics competition for high school students. Now in its 19th year, the annual competition is a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring tens of thousands of high school students to become the robotics engineers of the future.

The Scene At FRC 2009 Finals in Atlanta

This year’s competition features 1,809 teams from 12 countries, comprising more than 45,000 high school students, not to mention tens of thousands of volunteers and mentors. Singularity Hub is proud to be a sponsor of this year’s robotics team at Aragon High School in San Mateo, CA where I was once a teacher and robotics mentor.

The FIRST robotics competition commences each year with the annual kickoff party, during which the rules of the year’s competition are announced. The competition features a different game each year, usually involving a sport court where robots compete against each other to meet an objective, such as putting balls into nets. The 2009 competition, dubbed Lunacy, featured robots competing on a simulated moon environment. This year’s competition, dubbed “Breakaway”, is a modified version of soccer (or futbol if you prefer). Two alliances of three teams each compete on a 27′ x 54′ field with bumps attempting to earn points by collecting soccer balls in their goals. Check out the animation video later in this post.

Now that the kickoff party has completed, the real work has just begun. Each registered team is given a common kit of parts provided by FIRST and then has 6 weeks to build a robot for the competition. I can tell you from personal experience that this is an exciting, but also extremely demanding time for the students. In addition to juggling their normal academic commitments, students are working hard everyday after school to build their robot. The design decisions are tough – which combination of strength, speed, agility, size, or several other factors will produce the most successful robot?  The 6 weeks goes by way too fast, and before they know it teams are off to the regional competitions in March.

The FIRST Robotics Competition, or FRC, is just one of several competitions for all ages from kindergarten to high school now hosted by Kamen’s nonprofit US FIRST, but the FRC is still by far the most prominent of these competitions.

FIRST competition founder Dean Kamen is no stranger to innovation, nor to Singularity Hub. Hub readers may recall that Kamen is the man behind the Luke prosthetic arm, part of the US government’s massive multi-year initiative to develop the next generation of prosthetic arms. Kamen is also the inventor of the Segway.

If you have some time and skills to offer, I highly recommend you find a local high school and volunteer as a mentor for their robotics team.  It is a very rewarding experience to work with these students.

Check out the animation video describing Breakaway below: