The Blair Robot Project : Team 449
About the Blair Robotics Team
The Blair Robotics Team, #449, engages students in designing, building, and programming robots. Our primary focus is the FIRST Robotics Competition. This year, like last year, we are also building and programming VEX robots.
The FIRST Competition
FIRST was created by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter. It has steadily grown in size since its first year in 1992. FIRST was created to give students an opportunity to learn about engineering through experience while being guided by adult mentors. Each year, from the kickoff in January to the ship date in February, teams have 6 weeks to design and build a robot that can play the game announced at the kickoff. This year's game is called “FIRST Overdrive." Our robot can earn points by driving around the track and by "hurdling" a 40-inch diameter ball, known as a trackball, over the 6.5 foot overpass. Despite the competitive atmosphere, there has always been a strong emphasis on “Gracious Professionalism” (the idea that teams show sportsmanship and help out teams in need of assistance).
The Blair Robot Project
The Blair Robot Project, based in Silver Spring, MD, was founded in 2000 and has competed in FIRST every year since, except in 2005. In 2004, our team was part of the three-team alliance that won the Chesapeake Regional Competition. Unfortunately, most of our members were seniors and graduated in 2004, leaving us with too few experienced members to compete in 2005 or to do particularly well in 2006. Last year, in 2007, though our robot did not rank that highly, we are proud of how well we designed our robot, which had the capability of performing very well. We were able to demonstrate this capability at the Battle 'O Baltimore, an unofficial FIRST event held in August, where we were proud to place fourth out of 20 teams in the qualifying matches.
This year we competed in two regionals of the 2008 FIRST Robotic Competition, FIRST Overdrive. At the New Jersey Regional, we were seeded 12 out of 63 teams and were picked by 1089, with 1676 rounding out our alliance for the quarterfinals. Unfortunately after winning a match against 103, 25, and 381, we lost our next two matches, putting us out of the elimination tournament. However, we are proud of how well we did and were lucky enough to win the Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology" Award for our design features. We continued to play well at Chesapeake, this time making it into the semifinals, with the help of our alliance captain 2234 and team 341. Despite the strong play of our alliance, our stint in the elimination tournament came to an end when our potentiometer was broken off of our shaft, rendering our ball manipulation system unusable in the semifinal matches. With any luck, we will be able to once again show off this year's robot at the Battle 'O Baltimore this summer.
We have always prided ourselves with being almost exclusively student managed, student designed, and student built. Our goal is to teach our student members how to be effective engineers, and we firmly believe that experience is the best teacher. Even though we don’t always have as awesome a robot as the higher-budget teams, we have always learned from the experience.
As most of our members were new last year, we spent the fall building and programming VEX robots, which are smaller scale “erector set” robots. The success of the VEX building last fall has lead us to create an in-team competition that is designed to prepare new team members for competing in FIRST by working in groups to build robots with current members of the team serving as mentors.