The First Robotics Competition (FRC)

The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is the most advanced competition out of all competitions that are organised by FIRST. Over 6,000 teams participate in this competition across the globe. However, more than 4,000 of these teams are from the United States of America and only 3 teams are present in India, all from Mumbai, out of which we are one team (Data as per the 2019-20 season). Thus, we travel internationally even for the regional competition and in 2020 we were scheduled to go to Australia from 13th to 23rd March 2020.

This video gives a great brief on the FRC.

The matches of the competition are 3v3, where 3 teams work together as an alliance and face another alliance of 3 teams. However, teams that may be in our alliance for one match may become our opponents for the next match. Thus, we have to strategise in such a way that we tell the teams in our alliance enough for us to work efficiently together without letting them know too much about our team.

The matches are 2 minutes 30 seconds long, wherein the first 15 seconds is the time where the robot has to function autonomously or the drivers can drive the robot only through what they can see through the robot's cameras. Thus, at this time, team players are not able to see the game. The last 2 minutes 15 seconds is teleoperated time, where drivers can control their robots through joysticks or controllers.

A picture of the complete robot for the FRC 2020 season.

Programming

I was a part of the programming team in Elev8 in the 2019-20 season. The programming team consisted of nine students, out of which I was the youngest. Two students worked on the "vision" aspect, where we used a Limelight 2+ camera to produce high-resolution images to guide drivers as well as to identify retroreflective tapes and to detect balls.

I was on the other part of the team where we made the entire robot code in Java. We had to make the drive, ball intake, ball shooting and robot hanging code. The biggest challenge was the drive code, as the other 3 only required the basic running of a motor.

The chassis (basic central structure) of the robot comprised eight wheels, out of which we powered only four with four motors. We started by just running the motors to move the robot straight ahead. However, we realised that there was always an error that came up due to the wear and tear of wheels or one motor being more efficient than the other. This resulted in the robot not moving in a straight line. Therefore, we tried to incorporate PID (Proportional - Integral - Derivative) code. In PID, we used 3 constants - a proportional constant, an integral constant and a derivative constant). We added encoders to the robot that returned the velocities and accelerations of the various motors. We then applied the 3 constants whose optimal values were found through trial and error. These constants adjusted the velocities and accelerations of the left and right motors making them nearly equal.

Another major change in our code that we made was that we added trapezoidal motion profiling. This meant that during the autonomous time (the first 15 seconds of the match), we created code that used the amount of distance to be travelled to find out whether the robot should accelerate to maximum speed. If it was not supposed to, then the code would find out to what speed the robot should accelerate so that it could cover the distance in the least possible time. If the robot was expected to accelerate to maximum speed, then the code would find out at what point should the robot start decelerating. This created a trapezoid-shaped velocity/time graph, hence the name trapezoidal motion profiling.

A GIF of a part of the robot being powered to shoot balls into a high goal.

Outreach and Sponsorship

Another major component of this competition is outreach. This means reaching out to the underprivileged and people with lesser opportunities and teach them about STEM and robotics while spreading the message of FIRST. Locally, we regularly visited the Sankalp Shikshan Sanstha every Saturday, where we met children with hearing disabilities. At first, we found it challenging to communicate with them, but later we started to understand each other. We also visited students from the Acorn Foundation at Dharavi every Friday. These students were from very economically backward societies and they had no means or opportunities to pursue STEM and robotics. However, when we reached out to children from both these foundations, we realised that they were as skilled as we were. Their grasping capability was tremendous and within weeks, they were building their own small robots using the Lego EV3 sets and programming it using the Lego Mindstorms software.

We had also conducted 2 FIRST awareness camps - Sinarmas World Academy and Creative Kids at Jakarta, Indonesia. In our school too, to spread the message of women empowerment, we taught girls from lower grades every week about the basics of robotics. This was done because it is often found that it is mainly boys that are interested in engineering, STEM and robotics. Thus, by conducting these outreaches, we hoped to Elev8 Individuals, Elev8 Teams and Elev8 Communities!

Additionally, we hosted several FLL (FIRST Lego League) kickoffs, wherein we held a mock FLL competition and sponsored the winning team to participate in the real FLL competition. This gave several students the opportunities that they would not have been able to receive normally. We have held several FLL kickoffs at our school, the American School of Bombay as well as the Nehru Science Centre in Mumbai. We have also travelled globally to Turkey, Singapore and Nepal to conduct outreaches and even help rookie FRC Teams. In 2019, we were invited by the Education Minister of Goa to conduct outreaches. We also conducted an FLL Kickoff at Goa.

To conduct these outreaches, we required a large number of funds. Therefore, we reached out to large companies and request them to sponsor us so we could continue to spread the message of FIRST. I had met with the CEO of Forevermark India, Mr Sachin Jain, who promised a sponsorship of Rs. 1,00,000 as well as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Mr Shaktikanta Das. In the 2019-20 season, we had received sponsorships ranging from Rs. 1,00,000 to Rs 5,00,000 from over a dozen companies including JM Financial, Marsh Insurance and Ambuja Cement.

A combination of 3 photogarphs of Ishaan Shah helping children at the Acorn Foundation and on sponsorship meetings with the CEO of Forevermark, Mr Sachin Jain, as well as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Mr Shaktikanta Das.