Australian success in FIRST Robotics Competition

The annual FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) world championship, recently held in St Louis, Missouri, challenged students from around the world to brainstorm, design, prototype, build and program a robot in just 45 days.

For Australian participants, the journey to the championship started at FIRST’s Australian regional competition held in Sydney in March. The first regional competition to be held in Australia attracted participants from not only around the country but also Hawaii, Brazil, Taiwan, China and Singapore. This was followed by the regional competition in Hawaii, where teams from Australia and around the world took part in the FIRST Robotic Challenge (FRC) regional event.

‘Recycle rush’, the 2015 game, was a recycling-themed game played by two alliances of three robots each. Robots score points by stacking totes on scoring platforms, capping those stacks with recycling containers and properly disposing of pool noodles, representing litter.

Macquarie University team ‘Thunder Down Under’ won both the robot game and the overall Engineering Inspiration Award for outreach and community engagement in their division from a field of 76 robots. This qualified the team to play in ‘Einstein’, the elite grand final competition.

“We are the first Australian team to get this far and the only international team to play for the grand final,” said Michael Heimlich, CORE Professor at Macquarie University. “We were eliminated in the quarter finals but did not get the wooden spoon at this most prestigious level. Our performance made us one of only four teams from nearly 3000 total to receive a NASA sponsorship and an automatic berth at next year’s championship.”

FIRST’s mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by engaging them in mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills that inspire innovation. The program gives teams the opportunity to design and build mechanical, electrical and software controls systems, as well as integrate them all into one remote-controlled machine.