This Year's Robotic's Challenge

Last Saturday, my son's First Tech Challenge (FTC) Robotic's team attended the unveiling of this year's challenge.  The competition is titled "Ring-it-Up" and is essentially a more complicated version of tick-tack-toe played via 2 on 2 robots.  I coach 2 teams at the FTC level through my son's scout troop and the boys are very excited about this year's challenge.

There are two good things about this years challenge - one the field has no real obstacles to contend with and one of the ways to score at the end of the game is for a robot to lift it's teammate up.  If the robot is a full inch off the ground it's 30points, plus 5 points for each inch after that!

I've clipped out an animated video that describes the game play and how the scoring works.  It's pretty intense.  In FTC there are size restrictions on the robot as they must start each match fitting within an 18 inch cube.  Some of the scoring elements are three to four feet high so means we'll need some form of robotic arm or telescoping platform.

Outside of getting prepared for Fall-In there will be limited war-gaming related activity as our basement gets turned into a robot factory for the next few months.  But then again, competitive robotics is a blast so it's a pretty good trade-off!