‘Coopetition’ in practice

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

It’s tournament season for a high school competition that gives “March madness” a high-tech twist. This is the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Competition, an event said to “create the excitement of a basketball championship with the intensity of a rock concert and the frenzy of NASCAR — and put it all together.”

“The competition is really exciting this year for both participants and spectators ... and this regional will have several teams that have won past world championships,” said Dan Green, director of the Midwest regional.

Topping that list is Team Hammond, which Green says has earned the most championships titles in competition history. It will be joined by the RoboDogs of Crown Point and 50 other teams, including some from as far as Texas and New Jersey, and even one from Istanbul, Turkey, at the Midwest Regional of the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Competition, taking place at the University of Illinois Chicago Pavilion today, Friday and Saturday.

In January, more than 1,800 participating teams around the world received a kit of core parts along with rules for this year’s game, called “Logo Motion.” Each team had six weeks to construct its robot before shipping it to competition sites. The robots are about 5 feet tall, weigh about 130 pounds, and come in a fascinating variety of different designs to achieve the same goal.

The goal of this year’s game is for the robots to score points by hanging inflated tube shapes onto a metal rack. The game has many 2-minute and 15-second rounds in which two alliances of three robots each are on a playing field, which is about half the size of a basketball court. Each round begins with a 15-second “autonomous period,” for which the teams will have pre-programmed their robots to move and attempt to score. After that the students remotely control the robots to work cooperatively with the other two robots in their alliance. In the last 10 seconds each robot is to release a mini-robot to race up a pole to score additional points.

“The matches are a lot of fun to watch, and there’s a lot of cheering from the stands,” Green said. “Typically between each match a team will need to make repairs and tweaks to their robot. The pit area is like NASCAR pits, but the public is welcome to walk through. You’ll see creativity and innovation. And you’ll also see stress and cooperation.

“If a team doesn’t have a spare part, you’ll see that another may have it and lend it to them. Or if they can’t fix something or lack a tool, another team might help. After all, a team never knows who will be their alliance partner in the next round.”

Green explained that “coopetition’ is part of the philosophy of F.I.R.S.T. Robotics.

“It’s not an accident that teams here are forced to work together,” he said. “Contrasted with the win-lose mentality that many kids today are brought up with, this is based on a win-win mentality, that you need others and when we share ideas, we’re all better off.”

F.I.R.S.T. (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) also has programs for younger students, as well as an introductory robotics program that will be demonstrated on the mezzanine level at the UIC Pavilion. These are the F.I.R.S.T. LEGO League and the F.I.R.S.T. Tech Challenge.