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There has been a craze about robot competition off late. It shows the urge of human being to strive for technical excellence. It all started with the organisation “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology” ( FIRST) which is pioneer in the field of robotics competition. It was founded by Dean Kamen. It invites professionals and young people from all over over the world and ask them to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. From the day of foundation, this organisation has the distinction of creating the world's leading high school robotics competition. It has provided a platform for young people, their schools and communities where they can compete with each other in the field of science and technology. This has simultaneously helped in uplifting the standard of science and technology. Their outreach includes the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), the FIRST Vex Challenge (FVC), the FIRST Lego League (FLL), and Junior FIRST Lego League (JFLL). These four competitons are targeted at students aged 14-18, 14-18, 9-14, and 6-9 respectively. Their popularity can be gauged from the astonishing figures that over 100,000 students and 40,000 adult mentors from around the world participated in one of FIRST's competitions in the year 2005 alone. In 2006, the competition is aiming to reach over 28,000 high-school-aged young people on over 1,125 teams in 33 regional events.
Taking encouragement from FIRST’s success, other organizations have also come up and they are flourishing too. Following is the list of robot competitions arranged by class:
Middle & High School
College
- In the Mobot competition, the robot is required to navigate on non-flat surfaces.
This also qualifies for the open category.
- The Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory (http://maslab.csail.mit.edu/) is one of the few college-level vision-based autonomous robotics competition in the world. The main feature of this game is that it is conducted by and for MIT undergraduates.
- The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) is a competition for autonomous ground vehicles that must traverse outdoor obstacle courses without any human interaction.
Open
- The Central Illinois Robotics Club is sponsoring its second annual Robot contest. The event will be open to everyone. Participants are free to use any type of microcontrollers for the processor and any type of motors for the drive mechanism.
- The International BEAM Robot Games provides a platform for both amateur and professional to present their designs to each other, to the press and to the public. Currently, it is in its sixth year. Design sophistication, novelty, efficiency of power source and quality of hardware innovation are some of the criteria for judgement.
- The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition for robotic vehicles to complete an under-200 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert.
- In the Rope Climb competition, the robot is required to climb a 9 mm climbing rope that is suspended from the ceiling. It has to return to bottom also.
- In Robot Soccer contest, a yellow tennis ball is pushed by two opposing teams of single robot towards opposite goals on a virtual football field.
- In the Bot Bash competition, people build robots and dash them into each other.
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