ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Here are the first pictures form the FLL World festival in Atlanta. FLL Opening Ceremony, with ice. LEGO show and help point. Interview on the Moon, with Steven C. for Moonbots.org Jay's Raching Machine SUMO BOTs, from Bryan Bonahoom (sorry about misidentifying them previously) Wall-E Bryan, Chris, Steve, and Mantis, in real and on the NXT Box. Flow chart of the AI program. 13 year old wrote a AI program in NXT-G. please feel free to stop by and talk with us. Martyn

With the FIRST LEGO League fast approaching, about a month away, the new NXTLog Challenge is Smart Move! From the NXTLog website: "Your challenge is to look at your community and discover how people, animals, information, and things travel. Once you know how people and things move in your community, pick one main mode of transportation and improve it through a MINDSTORMS NXT robot design prototype." All the standard rules apply; projects must be tagged "smartmove". Entries are due April 30th. Read more here . The FLL World Festival will be April 14-17 at the Georgia Dome, in Atlanta, Georgia. As always, some contributors to the NXT Step blog will be there, so be sure to drop by! Also, the FLL World Festival 2011 will be held in St. Louis! Read more about this year's World Festival here . Finally, next years' challenge has been released: Body Forward! Happy building! Richard

I'm waiting on some videos to post more about the FTC World Championships and our robot, but in the meantime you can see a video our team put together of our experience at the competition here . I also thought I'd post a description of this year's game so that readers can understand what's going on in the videos. You can click here to see an animation from FIRST that explains how the game works. At a tournament, teams first participate in several qualifying matches . During each qualifying match, two randomly selected teams ally with each other against two other randomly selected teams. The two winning teams gain 2 q ualifying points , while the two losing teams don't gain any. After the qualifying rounds, the team with the most qualifying points is ranked #1, and so on. But what happens if multiple teams have the same number of qualifying points? In this case, a somewhat-confusing tiebreaker is used. After each qualifying match, the four participating teams recie...

Power Surge had a great time competing at the FTC World Championships this year. Congratulations to the teams on the winning alliance: the RoboRaiders, Longhorns, and Jr. Bomb Squad! My team was ranked #1 in our division after winning all of our qualifying rounds, and made the highest score in both divisions (222). In the elimination rounds, we made it to the finals in our division (Edison), but a strange problem hit our robot and kept us from winning them. I'll be making some posts later on with pictures and videos of the event and of our robot. -Jonathan

The FIRST Championship event, held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, GA, is coming right up. The FRC Championships, FTC World Championships, and FLL World Festival will all be held there during April 16-18. You can find more information about the event on FIRST's website, here . My FTC team, 2945 Power Surge, has been very busy for the past several weeks preparing for the FTC World Championships, and we're finishing up the final preparations on our robot, team shirts, pit banner, etc. We hope to see you there! -Jonathan http://www.teampowersurge.org/