High school students participating in the FIRST Team 423 - SEC Robotics won a Judges Award at Philadelphia Regional FIRST Robotics Competition held on March 27 – 29, 2008. We are proud to share this award and honor with the team as our software was used as a part of the project.

The FIRST Robotics Competition, FRC, is an international robotics competition for high-school-aged students involving over 1,300 teams, 35,000 students, 40 regional competitions with a championship event held inside the Georgia Supper Dome. FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is an organization, founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Personal Transport, dedicated to inspiring young people to become science and technology heroes.

This year competition, FIRST Over Drive, had six robots racing around a 27’x 54’ race track while trying to coral and hurdle 40” balls, which weigh about 10 pounds, over a 6’ high bar. So, students were to build and design robots that manage this task within 6 weeks.

One of the aspects is software that ensures correct robot driving. Instrumentation ModelKit was used to design custom dashboard to monitor the state and nature of the system.

Joshua Lynn, Engineering Mentor of the 423 SEC Robotics Team,

“We had a very specific need and no ability to code the graphics to accomplish what was required to make one aspect of our control system interactive. Thanks to the Instrumentation ModelKit we were able to build, tweak, refine and implement the graphical representation of our system we need to make interactive without writing a single line of code! This was key to our success because we had other code that was essential to write or the machine would not function.”

And all team’s effort was awarded and honored by the judges:

"There's no mayhem in this robot because it uses innovative software to interpret commands and make smart decisions. Their clever design has added the intelligence of a "5th" player to the drive team."

We congratulate the 423 SEC Robotics Team on this recognition and wish them luck in future competitions. Keep it up!

For more information on the 423 SEC Robotics Team project and the use of Instrumentation ModelKit in it, please review the article.