Student Roboticists Compete to Create C3PO, Share Their Source Code
by Sam Dean - Mar. 12, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Beginning today, student teams will compete in the Silicon Valley regional qualifying event for the FIRST Robotics Competition, a six-week challenge to design, build, and test robots. The teams are sponsored by tech companies such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as the NASA Ames Research Center. CollabNet says it has contributed nearly $250,000 worth of its collaborative software development platform to help students program their robots. We've covered open source robot development efforts before, here, here, and here. Will the competition move us closer to an open source version of C3PO?
More than 42,000 high-school students in 1,680 teams from 10 countries are competing in the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition. (Dean Kamen, the man behind the Segway scooters and many other inventions, is the founder of FIRST.) Twenty thousand mentors have volunteered to assist them. The competition is observing open source principles, according to CollabNet:
"The students have six weeks to design, build, and test robots to compete in regional competitions that measure the effectiveness of each robot, the power of collaboration, and the determination of the students. All the source code for the software control system that the teams program to operate their robots is available to students on the CollabNet platform, enabling the teams to be self-supporting and to contribute code that they develop to the less-experienced teams."
Student teams that win in regional events will advance to the FIRST Championship in Atlanta, April 16th to 18th. Participating students are also eligible to apply for more than $9.7 million in scholarships offered by universities, colleges, and companies.
The field of open source robotics is growing, as you can see in the links at the top of this post. It would be great to see the open source community take us beyond robot vacuum cleaners found in homes, and the mostly single-task-specific robots found in industrial use. We'll keep our eyes on the competition and post the winners when they emerge.
