Saturday 09.01.2021, the entire FIRST® community discovered, at the «kickoff» the 2021 challenge « Game Changers », or rather the challenges, because this year they are 3, in order to adapt to the current sanitary constraints which will not allow the teams to travel, and to open the competition.
A first working session in Visio took place on Saturday evening, where the team was divided into small groups with the following instructions to study a specific part of the specifications. Sunday was devoted to debriefing the specifications and fine-tuning our strategy. Each groups presented his specific part of the specifications, and is with a complet vision that the team was able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each challenge and decide on the priorities for the season.
Here is our ranking of the 3 challenges
N° 1 : At Home challenge
A competition « At Home » where the robots’ prowess is filmed to enable the judges to award the various prizes.
It is divided into 5 sub-challenges.
- The 3 first are terrain courses that the robot must complete in a limited time: either in total autonomy or controlled by the pilot. Each course is different and contains obstacles to bypass / beacons to be recovered .
- The 2 other challenges consists of retrieving and firing bullets into the target.
This concrete challenge, enabling the team to implement all its skills (CAD, Programming, Steering …) was unanimously defined as the highest priority.
N° 2 : Innovation challenge
Challenge totally different from the At Home challenge. It is much more vast and consists in imagining an object, an invention responding to common needs, to a problem (such as for example those of a person with back problems, those of a handicapped person or even problems that we could encounter in everyday life), to bring a solution and to describe this solution, both from a technical and financial point of view.
A majority of Robo’Lyon students decided to take up this challenge: this challenge is free and leaves room for imagination, it allows us to give shape to our ideas, and it goes further than a simple robot competition.
N° 3 : Game Design challenge
This challenge consists in creating a game that could be used in a face-to-face competition: definition of the theme, the terrain, the rules of the game, the technical constraints…
Although it also calls for creativity, this challenge has not been one of our priorities, as it seems less concrete and perhaps harder to win.
We are keeping it aside for the moment, and we will see, depending on the progress of the others, if we can devote some time to it.
I think it was well organised because it allowed us to update the different challenges without forgetting anything and therefore to understand the specifications exhaustively.
Téva, Robo’Lyon’s 10th student
Based on these priorities, the team was mobilised from this Saturday: each student registered in 1 or more of the proposed groups: 2 groups for the Innovation challenge and no less than 12 groups for the At Home challenge: the latter requiring the creation of a field, videos and above all a Robot!
Given everyone’s enthusiasm and investment, the 2021 season promises to be very interesting. See you next week to discover the progress of the different groups.