FIRST Robotics Competition Championship 2012

By Amruth Uppaluri, 9th Grade, and Karthik Uppaluri, 10th Grade

The 2012 FIRST robotics championship which started on Wednesday, April 25th ended on Saturday, April 28th. The event was held in St. Louis, MO at the Edward Jones Dome where 30,000 participants, fans, mentors, families and friends joined to cheer teams from around the world. The dome rocked with fans who were screaming for their favorite alliance, while the weather outside was creating its own noise. Thunder, lightning, hail and pouring rain outside did not stop the robotics event from ending on a high note.

Our team, Team Plasma from Mesa, Arizona flew to St. Louis on Wednesday morning to attend this “SuperBowl of robotics” as one of the presenters stated. The teams who qualified were assigned to different sub groups named after famous scientists such as Newton, Archimedes, Curie and Einstein etc. We were in the Archimedes group.

This year’s FRC challenge was titled Rebound Rumble and featured a modified basketball court where 3 robots from each alliance ( Red & Blue ) competed to score points during a two-minute 15 second match. The game started in autonomous mode where robots shot the pre-loaded basketballs into the baskets. Then, drivers from each team remotely controlled their robots to pick up balls and score as many points as possible. Some robots played defense by trying to keep the others from accumulating basketballs and tossing them over to the other side.

Our hopes were high after the first day of competition as we were ranked 6th out of 100 teams in our group. The next day, Friday, was a little bit of a disappointment where we slipped to 21st place. On Saturday, the final day of competition, the top eight teams from each of the fields selected other top teams to form the alliances for the final championships. Unfortunately, we were not selected and finished 37th overall and are very proud of our accomplishment. The winning alliance was Team 180, S.P.A.M., Stuart, Fla.; Team 16, Bomb Squad, Mountain Home, Ark.; Team 25, Raider Robotix, North Brunswick, N.J. from the Galileo Division.

This years’ highest honor the Chairman’s Award was presented at the FRC Championships to Simbotics from St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada and was recognized as the team that best exemplified the purpose and goals of FIRST.

Each year this event is gaining worldwide attention as major sponsors are aligning themselves with this great organization. Companies such as Boeing, U.S. Air Force, NASA, Autodesk, General Motors, Microsoft, Google, Rockwell Automation, UL and others are some of the key sponsors of the USFIRST championships.