An Introduction to FRC and Autonomous Robotics

Welcome!

I am a member of FRC Team #4183, also known as Bit Buckets Robotics. We are a local Tucson team consisting of an extremely talented group of High School students and mentors. As a team, we focus on finding the most effective solutions to the engineering and design challenges we face.

We participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition, which is a world-wide robotics competition design to give high school students a taste of real world engineering.

The varsity Sport for the Mind^TM, FRC combines the excitement of sport with the rigors of science and technology. Under strict rules, limited resources, and time limits, teams of 25 students or more are challenged to raise funds, design a team "brand," hone teamwork skills, and build and program robots to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors. It’s as close to "real-world engineering" as a student can get. Volunteer professional mentors lend their time and talents to guide each team. -FIRST

 Competing in FRC is a task which requires a team to excel in many different fields - CAD design, electrical engineering, fabrication, computer programming, robot driving skill, graphic design, project management, organization, fundraising, obtaining sponsors, networking. I personally am part of the programming team, and most of my time researching, writing, documenting, and testing code which will run our robot.

While programming a robot is the job of multiple people on our team, I personally am in charge of programming the autonomous side of the robot. This years FRC competition requires the robot to operate without any user input for the 15 seconds of the match.

Autonomous programming is something that many teams fail to complete to a reasonable degree - some because they run out of time programming other parts of their robot, or some because they do not understand an effective way to go about it.

The goal of this Senior Project is twofold: first, to learn and program effective autonomous operation on team 4183's robot, and second, to teach and assist other teams in attempting autonomous operation in future years.