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Qualcomm is inventing, developing, and commercializing power-efficient on-device AI tools to help build an exciting future — one that advances the edge of possible.In CRESCENDO presented by Haas, a new challenge debuting January 6, 2024, FIRST Robotics Competition teams will use their engineering skills and creative power to entertain and move the world. Registration is now open.

HOUSTON, April 22, 2023 – This week, FIRST, a robotics community that prepares young people for the future, brought together approximately 50,000 people from around the world as hundreds of student robotics teams put their innovation, teamwork, and robotics skills to the test at the 2023 FIRST Championship presented by BAE Systems, which took place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.3. FIRST LEGO League World Festival – FIRST LEGO League (ages 4-16, varies by country) introduces younger students to real-world engineering challenges by inviting them to conduct research projects and build LEGO-based autonomous robots to complete tasks on a thematic playing surface. FIRST LEGO League teams, guided by their imaginations, discover exciting career possibilities and learn to make positive contributions to society.

FIRST is a robotics community that prepares young people for the future through a suite of inclusive, team-based robotics programs for ages 4-18 (PreK-12) that can be facilitated in school or in structured after-school programs. Boosted by a global support system of volunteers, educators, and sponsors that include over 200 of the Fortune 500 companies, teams operate under a signature set of FIRST Core Values to conduct research, fundraise, design, build, and showcase their achievements during annual challenges. An international not-for-profit organization founded by accomplished inventor Dean Kamen in 1989, FIRST has a proven impact on STEM learning, interest, and skill-building well beyond high school. Participants and alumni of FIRST programs gain access to education and career discovery opportunities, connections to exclusive scholarships and employers, and a place in the FIRST community for life. Learn more at firstinspires.org. This year, SUPERPOWERED challenged more than 50,000 student teams from around the world to explore energy sources and how energy is stored, distributed, and used, and identify a solution to improve the energy journey – putting their superpowered creativity to work for a better future. FIRST Championship, the world’s largest celebration of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for students, commemorated the conclusion of the 2022-2023 robotics season, FIRST ENERGIZE presented by Qualcomm. To empower young people to be leaders and innovators, this year’s energy theme addresses global challenges related to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #7, focused on ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.Special guests at the 2023 FIRST Championship included Dean Kamen, FIRST founder and prolific inventor and other global leaders in business and innovation.2023 FIRST Championship Sponsors: The 2023 FIRST Championship is presented by BAE Systems. Co-Sponsors include: Bechtel Group Foundation, DoD STEM, Ford Motor Company, The Gene Haas Foundation, Google, Mouser Electronics, Rockwell Automation, Inc., United Therapeutics Corporation, The Walt Disney Imagineering, and Zebra Technologies. Friends of FIRST Sponsors include: ARMI BioFab USA, Ball Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, Coca-Cola, Houston First, Kettering University, PwC, and TE Connectivity.

The not-for-profit organization’s annual four-day event concluded Saturday with robotics teams competing in heart-pounding match finals for the FIRST Robotics Competition and FIRST Tech Challenge international championships, in front of thousands of cheering fans. Four teams from Madera, California; Champaign, Illinois; Ventura, California; and Guelph, Ontario, Canada, were the FIRST Robotics Competition Winning Alliance for this year’s game, CHARGED UP presented by Haas. Teams from Newbury Park, California; Bellevue, Washington; and Plainsboro, New Jersey, were the FIRST Tech Challenge Winning Alliance for POWERPLAY presented by Raytheon Technologies.55 FIRST LEGO League Explore division teams (ages 6-10) presented exhibits of their SUPERPOWERED models and research to showcase their critical thinking and imagination skills during the event. The Core Values Award, Team Poster Award, Team Model Award, Coding Award, and Challenge Solution Award were presented during a ceremony honoring all exhibiting FIRST LEGO League Explore teams. Nearly 7,000 FIRST Tech Challenge teams competed during the 2022-2023 season, with 192 teams advancing to this week’s FIRST Championship. The presenting sponsor for the FIRST Tech Challenge season is Raytheon Technologies.On Saturday, FIRST previewed its arts-themed 2023-2024 season, FIRST IN SHOW presented by Qualcomm, with an inspiring video tour spotlighting the roles our STEM skills play in the arts and empowering young people to bring their ideas to life.

1. FIRST Robotics Competition Championship – FIRST Robotics Competition (ages 14-18) combines sports excitement with the rigors of science and technology. Under strict rules, limited resources, and time limits, students are challenged to fundraise, design a team identity, exercise teamwork, and build and program robots to compete in an exciting game that includes autonomous and driver-operated periods. In the 2023 game, CHARGED UP presented by Haas, teams were inspired to see the potential of energy storage in a new light as they competed in alliances to charge up their communities.

108 FIRST LEGO League Challenge division teams (ages 9-16, varies by country) competed at this week’s event through robot matches, Innovation Project presentations, and FIRST Core Values activities. Top honors went to Champion’s Award winner, Team 60008, FSINGENIUM, Sarriguren, Spain; Champion’s Award Finalist, Team 59975, LITBOT100, Kaunas, Lithuania; Champion’s Award Finalist, Team 60009, Legotronic Beavers, Torres de Elorz, Spain; and Champion’s Award Finalist, Team 59969, RoboRazors from Amman, Jordan.FIRST and ConferenceDirect work to ensure that we have a variety of price points, quality products, and amenities all situated in a prime location to ensure that we meet the needs and desires of 2023 FIRST Championship attendees and exhibitors. Only ConferenceDirect, the Event’s contracted Official Housing Company is authorized to use any likeness of the Event, claim partnership with and allowed to book within the Event Official Hotel Block. Reservations made through any company other than ConferenceDirect, are at your own risk. If you are contacted by anyone other than ConferenceDirect, please notify the [email protected] immediately. Do not provide any personal or financial information to another housing vendor claiming to have rooms for the Event. Only FIRST and ConferenceDirect will contact your team regarding housing for the 2023 FIRST Championship.FIRST is proud to partner with housing & travel experts, ConferenceDirect to bring you more than 30 FIRST-reviewed hotel locations for teams, volunteers, and all attendees to choose from during the 2023 FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas.

As described in our Privacy Policy, FIRST does not sell, share, or provide participant or attendee personal information, such as email addresses, to third parties, other than as required for delivering FIRST Programs and Events. Additionally, no company is authorized for any purpose to distribute or sell lists of participants or attendees for our Programs or Events.FIRST teams (coaches, mentors, students, chaperones, parents, and family members/siblings) should use the team link above to register and follow instructions and link below for hotel accommodations. This should be completed by the coach or team’s main contact. Interested volunteers can learn more about how to register on the Volunteer page.Houston, our gracious host city, is excited to welcome a record 45,000 people from around the world who will join us for the ultimate celebration of STEM and innovation. In 2022, the City of Houston hosted the largest FIRST Championship event to date, with 36,000 attendees from more than 50 countries. We’re thrilled at the prospect of the 2023 FIRST Championship being an even bigger celebration, focused on providing a welcoming and fun space for the FIRST community to gather and celebrate our season.

The 2023 FIRST Championship presented by BAE Systems Event Guide is your downloadable, printable guide to our event at the George R. Brown Convention Center, including notable happenings, safety information and event logistics.Make your FIRST event experience more memorable and affordable. We’ve negotiated hotel and travel discounts available exclusively for the FIRST community. Through our housing experts at ConferenceDirect, we provide you 24/7 access to full hotel descriptions, real-time availability, amenities, and other details allowing you to book quickly and confidently. FIRST requires every FIRST Championship attendee to be registered and badged, including adult team mentors, youth team members, parents, family members, chaperones, etc. who are participating in the event. Event registration grants access to participant-only activities and increases the security of the event. The 2023 FIRST Championship mobile app, sponsored by Bechtel, makes it easy to access all FIRST Championship information such as teams, maps, exhibitor information, and detailed schedules. Download the FIRST Championship App.

The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is a global high-school robotics competition. Every year, teams consisting of students and mentors have only six weeks to work together to build a robot to solve that year’s challenge. Each year has a new challenge, consisting of tasks such as scoring balls of varying sizes through goals, hanging tubes on racks, crossing obstacles, and more. Teams are responsible for doing everything the team requires, from fundraising to community outreach to engineering to programming. FRC emphasizes a culture of gracious professionalism and coopertition, creating an environment that while competitive, remains friendly.For teams in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area (FIRST’s Chesapeake District) such as Team 4099, there are three levels of these events. First, teams compete in two district events. The team’s performance at these events determines whether or not the team progresses to the FIRST Chesapeake District Championship. If a team performs well enough to reach this championship, they compete among the best teams in the Chesapeake District. After the District Championship, teams’ aggregate performance across the two district events and the Championship is evaluated. About twenty teams with the best performance in the district are then selected to attend the FIRST Championship in Detroit. At this event, teams compete among half of the best teams in the world. The other half attend the FIRST Championship in Houston. The teams that performs the best at these events are crowned World Champions, and attend the Festival of Champions.

Plans are being finalized for the 2023 FIRSTChampionship event. While we don’t yet have all the details confirmed, we wanted to share what we know now.

The 2023 FIRST Championship will host even more FIRSTRobotics Competition teams than 2022. In fact, it may end up being our biggest event ever! We’re planning for at least 600 FIRST Robotics Competition teams spread across 8 divisions. FIRST Robotics Competition will occupy the entire first floor of the George R. Brown Convention Center. We’re still working through the exact details of how teams will qualify for the event during the 2023 season. We know that we will still have a waitlist, which teams can join starting October 27, 2022 through the FIRST Dashboard. The FIRST Impact Award, formerly the Chairman’s Award, is the most prestigious award in the program and is the only way FIRST Robotics Competition teams can enter the Hall of Fame. To honor this achievement, Hall of Fame teams that earned their Chairman’s Award at the last ten FIRST Championships prior to 2022 are also pre-qualified teams. These teams are:

With Kickoff fast approaching, we are finalizing the game manual and wanted to share some details about 2023 Robot Rules that we think may help teams prepare for the season. With the exception of a couple rules about robot size and extension, all of the Robot Rules in the 2022 Game Manual are marked as “evergreen”, meaning you can expect them to stay pretty much the same year to year (so you can use the 2022 manual to help understand these changes). That doesn’t mean we will never iterate or tweak them year-to-year based on community feedback. The changes highlighted here are the ones we think are most likely to affect choices teams may make prior to Kickoff. Expect to see a few more minor changes to the Robot Rules in the 2023 Manual which will be highlighted in Team Update 0. The changes we want to highlight now include:

Lastly, we want to share an update to this blog where we first shared our plans to introduce AprilTags to the field in 2023. Following that blog, we received feedback from community experts and conducted further testing that led to a decision to revise some of the choices regarding the AprilTag implementation. We apologize to those of you that have already gotten a jump on testing, but we believe that this modification will result in a better experience for all teams using the tags. By changing to a lower resolution tag family, teams should be able to detect the tags from further away for a given resolution and use a little less CPU doing so (or process at a higher frame rate). The trade-off is an increase in false detections, which testing has shown can be mitigated by using an appropriate minimum size and more aggressively rejecting tags with bit errors. The updated information is below:As mentioned in the blog, there is an increase in maximum detection distance achieved by switching to the lower resolution tag family. This should allow teams to either detect the tags from further away, or potentially bump down in resolution (decreasing CPU and/or increasing processed framerate). The cost is the increase in false positives from the substantially reduced complexity of the tags. We recommend experimenting with setting a reasonable minimum tag size based on the size at the farthest distance you can accurately detect with your camera (i.e. the default settings of the April Tag library will happily return false positives much smaller than it can reliably detect the actual tag). We also recommend reducing the hamming correction to 1 or 0, while 2 is a good default value for larger tags, with the lower but count of the 16h5 tag a lower value is appropriate. You can also experiment with filtering detections based on the returned “decision margin” or adjusting other parameters of the quad detection. Example code utilizing soe or all of these techniques is expected to be released at Kickoff.

Hi there, answers to specific rules questions will be provided in the Official Q&A when it opens for the season. If you still have this question after reading the final text of the 2023 Game Manual after it is released at Kickoff, you can ask using the Q&A system.For more information about how to get involved and become a 2023 FIRST Championship Sponsor and beyond, please email us at [email protected]. Watch a recap from the 2022 FIRST Championship for a preview of this inspiring event.

FIRST Championship Houston is a multiple point campus, which includes five spaces: George R. Brown Convention Center, Minute Maid Park, Discovery Green, MArriott Marquis Hotel, and Hilton America’s Hotel.

Visit Event & Houston Info to find information on what to expect at FIRST Championship as you plan your visit, including registration, housing, event guidance, and more about our host city of Houston.Finally! FRC Charged Up has released, with an interesting stack-and-sort game involving cones and inflatable blocks and an easy balance endgame. We don’t have the stuff for swerve this year, so tank seems like a solid option – that, with a simple gripper for both items, should hopefully be solid at competition. Our hopes were however dashed at kickoff when, after 113 years of anticipation, the FRC announced that “Water Game” would not be played in 2023.

Lead mentor 1 or 2 may enter or edit their Kickoff information by following these steps (or view our step-by-step Kickoff Instructions with screenshots):Teams can also find a Kickoff event near them by checking out the Event Search Page. Remember, if a team is unable to pick-up their Kickoff Kit at the local kickoff selected, an alternate team may be designated to do so. Additionally, teams may opt to instead be a “MySite” team for an additional charge. Please visit the Mysite & Surrogate Kit Pick Up Information page for additional details.

If your team’s number ends with 60-99 or is over 5959, then you can change it to show the remaining seconds to not miss out on the fun. You can also turn off the team names if you want. Team names should be up to date as of 12/29/22, up to team 9311. If you notice that any team is missing or see any other issues, please let me know.

Happy new year everyone! More importantly, happy new FRC game! I can’t wait for kickoff, so I made a countdown timer for the Charged Up kickoff time that shows the team who’s number is the last four digits of the remaining time.The total seconds timer is currently at 677000. What is the next team that will be on both the traditional timer and the total seconds timer at the same time?

Feel free to look through the code, modify it, fork it, or whatever on the Repl.it page. This is actually an updated version of my countdown timer from last year, which you can read about and get to here.That’s vwry cool, I didn’t know that other teams did this as well. On the PHRED server as well as the OA server, we have a channel for “8:47-am-or-pm.” The OA server has decided that since it’s 8:47 in some part of the world, anything:47 is in play .

This voucher can be redeemed for one CIM Cooler 180 (an $8.00 value) or one 775 Cooler 360 (an $8.00 value) but products can be purchased in any combination and multiple amounts of the CIM Cooler or the 775 Cooler. After applying the voucher code during checkout, the total will be less $8.00.

You’ll also find a library of tutorials that will help you to accelerate your design phase, as well as an opportunity to take the Solid Edge certification exam free of charge. Siemens also invites all FIRST teams who are using SIEMENS software to apply for funding. Criteria for funding is detailed on our FIRST resource page, and made available on a first-come, first served basis.Our generous Suppliers often offer additional free and discounted hardware, software and services to FIRST Robotics Competition teams. In order to access these products, you may be asked to create an account with the Supplier. You should review the applicable terms and policies, including privacy and data gathering practices, of any website to which you navigate from this FIRST site or relating to any applications you use or install from these Suppliers. One of the first things you do when you receive your Kickoff Kit is to check its contents against the Checklists. If anything is missing or damaged 1) we’re so sorry! and 2) you need to let us know and we’ll make it right. Each season, FIRST Robotics Competition teams receive Kits of Parts (KoP). The KoP is not designed to be a “bolt together” solution to play the game, but is a starting point, containing mostly donated components from Suppliers across multiple industries.

The Kickoff Kit consists of items that we pack in totes (mostly in totes, there are typically exceptions for late or big items) and distributed to all teams. Watch this video to learn more about how to access SOLIDWORKS models of Kickoff Kit items.The open ordering phase of FIRST Choice is a traditional first-come, first-serve ordering process. Teams add items to their carts and check-out using credits remaining after the priority list phases.

What: $100 DevCycle platform credit. Adding an additional 200,000 MAU, or 2,000,000 experimentation events, or 5,000,000 EdgeDB operations in addition to the free tier!

The process we use to get information from you is built in to the registration system and available from noon (Eastern) on Jan. 7, 2023 to noon (Eastern) on Jan. 13, 2023. Please know and understand that we will not process requests that don’t use this system for teams who received their Kickoff Kits on or before Jan. 13, 2023. (If you’re a team who receives the Kickoff Kit after Jan. 13, 2023, please email us at [email protected] within 2 business days of receipt of your Kickoff Kit with any missing/damaged items.)

What: With Ansys OnScale, competitors now have access to cloud-native engineering simulation platform. Ansys OnScale combines multiphysics solver technology with the limitless compute power of cloud supercomputers. With Ansys OnScale, competitors can run massive numbers of full 3D multiphysics (mechanical, thermal, CFD) simulations in parallel to create true Digital Prototypes – digital representations of physical high-tech devices that capture the complete behavior of a device over its operating envelope — of their robots. By shifting expensive and time-consuming physical prototyping to digital prototyping, Ansys OnScale can reduce cost, risk, and production time for teams.The 2023 Virtual Kit Catalog and its one-page checklist (printed are copies in each Kickoff Kit and soft copies are available here) includes details about almost all Virtual Kit items confirmed as of fall, 2022 (note, this page gets updated so it takes precedence for any differences between here and the content in the voucher book/checklist).

To Access: Follow this link and fill out the team form. Then, proceed in the top corner to signup for Ansys OnScale normally! If you experience any difficulties, please contact us or visit our live chat!

FIRST and AndyMark use a priority list system to invite teams to indicate what they’d like and distribute items in a way that doesn’t result in a mad cyber rush to get to high value inventory that a typical first-come, first-serve model does.

The Canadian Pacific Regional Tournament will run from Tuesday February 28 2023 to Friday March 3 2023 at the Save On Food Memorial Centre in Victoria BC. See Event Details if you are participating, or if you wish to attend and watch the matches.In CHARGED UP presented by Haas, FIRST Robotics Competition teams will prepare for a challenge that is fully charged to inspire your team to see the potential of energy storage in a new light. Watch the season kickoff January 7, 2023 for the game reveal. Saturday, January 7, 2023 – Kickoff sparks the start of the 2023 FIRST Robotics Competition season, CHARGED UP presented by Haas. Join FIRST faves from around the world, Founder Dean Kamen, CEO Chris Moore, and special guests as we reveal the CHARGED UP game animation and other game and season details. Every year in January, RoboJackets plays an instrumental role in hosting the kickoff for the FIRST Robotics Challenge, the event in which FIRST unveils the specific game rules that the teams will be using in the coming year of competition. This year was no different. As usual, RoboJackets helped coordinate workshops to help teams succeed in the coming challenge, as well as hosting the presentation of the new challenge in the Ferst Center Theater.One change this year was holding the workshops before the presentations instead of after, as they had been in the past. This was done in response to feedback from attendees that the teams wanted more time during the day, and allowed teams to start on designs immediately after the game was revealed instead of having to split up to go to workshops.

Internally, RoboJackets made some changes to how the organization organizes the event. In the past, Kickoff has been coordinated by a single appointed officer, the Kickoff Coordinator. This year, in recognition of the importance of the event to the community and the amount of work required, the position was split into a small committee of three members, one 4th year and two 2nd years. This year’s Committee was Shishir Pandit-Rao, Abhiram Ghanta, and Yashas Ambati. In addition to the work distribution, there is also a knowledge transfer component. Shishir said: “by developing this committee approach, we hope to maintain better knowledge transfer to ensure this event is run smoothly for years to come!”RoboJackets hosted three workshops, one for each major discipline in FRC: Mechanical, Electrical, and Software. Notably, this year had much higher workshop participation than past years, between 40-70 attendees in each workshop, compared to 10-20 in previous years. Abhiram Ghanta attributed this to the fact that the workshops were held before the kickoff broadcast. In addition to these workshops, there are workshops that are related to the specifics of the game that were moved to a virtual format to be hosted by Georgia FIRST a week after kickoff.

FTC parts are stronger and the motors are more powerful but vex is far more versatile, they have pneumatics, and many other parts that Tetrix do not have.

I’m curious to hear about the differences between the two competitions and have a couple of questions and would love to hear a few responses from true enthusiasists.As I’m sure you know, FIRST has JrFLL, FLL, FTC, and FRC. Prior to FTC was VEX. For reasons outside the scope of this thread a decision was made to close VEX and start FTC. Ultimately a group of people negotiated the rights to take VEX outside of FIRST and start an independent organization.

As for size wise, there are more vex teams than FTC teams and more tournament than FTC also since vex follows a regional to world’s format, unlike FTC which is more of a “pyramid” type.For me & my 4H club, the lower costs that I experience, the lower barriers to entry for team & tournament organizers, and the ability to attend several tournaments spread out over a school year are the points that swing us. Plus I don’t want to have to fabricate parts from raw stock, so I stay away from that temptation, and just cut and bend the Vex parts.As a warning (though I haven’t really seen it in this thread) the Vex vs FTC debate can get a bit political, if any one tells you that one is absolutely better than the other I would take the opinion wth a grain of salt. Both are good, well run competitions, neither is perfect but both will expose your students to STEM fields and will provide quite a bit of fun and excitement.

What Blake isn’t telling you is that he was the founder of his teams and the driver of the tournament structure in our county. VEX tournaments exist in their capacity because of people like him. If you want tournament density and it doesn’t exist, then either expect to put the work in or choose the program accordingly. It’s much easier to start your own VRC regional tournament structure than it is to start your own FTC tournament structure.

I agree with Barry (and others) 100% as of right now the FTC vs VEX debate varies greatly from region to region. I was in RI last year and they are all about FTC, this year I moved to VA, while FTC is still available teams can find 3-4 Vex competitions within driving distance. If I was starting a new FTC or Vex program here I would probably lean towards Vex. In general whichever program is bigger in your area is probably going to be the better of the two.As you can tell from my question, I’m very new to the world of robotics competitions. As I have been doing research on the different competitions out there, I’ve noticed that the two major players in the space are FIRST and VEX. I’m curious to hear about the differences between the two competitions and have a couple of questions and would love to hear a few responses from true enthusiasists.

High tournament frequency is good if you want to do plenty of iterating and engineering across an entire (school) year. On the other hand, going to one or two tournaments in a mid-year burst let’s your season begin and end without crowding out any other activities you might want.For your tournament $ the FTC tournaments I have seen supply a little more flash and circus along with the STEM benefits. For some students this is exactly what they need. For other students – they don’t care.

My experiences with VEX competition days is magnitudes better than my experience with FTC competition days. Dropped wireless signals, people who give me the impression that they have ‘agendas’ in FIRST, and difficulty in integrating into the classroom are all working against FTC.So what if some folks like FTC better than I – Who am I to argue with them? I (we all) have better things to do than argue over which end of an egg should be eaten first, or other bogus topics.I echo the comments from Ed stated above, with a few minor corrections. If you would like to talk to people in the Boston area that are involved in FIRST for more specifics, then drop me a note [email protected] students with access to big budgets and non-trivial manufacturing resources should think about going into FRC after getting their feet wet (and building up a support infrastructure) in FTC or VRC.

Your location appears to be Boston, be sure to talk to both FTC and VRC participants specifically in your area to get a better idea of their experiences because this will best represent what your experience will be like.

Truth in advertising – I now (for about 2 months) am employed part-time by the non-profit Robotics Education and Competition Foundation that runs the Vex Robotics Competition and assists other STEM programs. I guess that, plus about 5 years of experience make me an enthusiast.

Do not worry about the VEX camp versus FIRST camp issues. It is a huge marketplace. It is only about 4% penetrated. There is room for everyone. And competition is good for the consumer.Vex permits some, but fewer custom fabricated parts than FTC. If you want to cut & bend your own parts, FTC has more opportunities, and in this regard is less (less than is the case in VRC) like a chess game in which you are challenged to outwit your opponents while sticking to a common set of parts.