We are the Plaid Pillagers, Morris' FIRST Robotics team, and this is our way of spreading the FIRST message to the community and letting anyone who is interested learn more about the team.

Halfway There, eek!

So, as mentioned earlier, we have a six week timeline to work on our robot, and this Monday marked the halfway mark for this season!  This is both exciting and scary, and a well needed wake up call to kick it into high gear.  Luckily, we have already fully designed and mapped out our robot and the steps necessary to build and run the robot!  We are using a drive system similar to that of the Mars Rovers, and we have a kicker system and several other spiffy features!  Now, before I talk more about the specs of the robot, it might be good to know what the game we are playing this year is!

 

    Breakaway-

         Breakaway is the game for 2010, and is basically a modified version of soccer.  You have 3 robots to a team, and the playing area is divided into 3 zones.  For each team, the zone their goal is in is the first zone, then the next is the second, then third.  If we assume the Red team's goal is on the left and the Blue team's is on the right, Red team's zone 1 is Blue team's zone 3, both share a common zone two, and then Red team's zone 3 is Blue team's zone 1.  The dividers of these sections are two "road bumps" that the robots can either climb, or there is a small gap in the middle of the bump through which a rather small robot could drive through.  There are many rules about how many robots from one team can be in each zone, but the main goal is the kick soccer balls into the opponents goal without getting scored upon yourself.  The reason for our Mars Rover style drive system is that it will easily allow us to climb over the bumps so we can traverse from one zone to the next.

 

    It's getting late, and there's much work to be done on the Chairman's Award which I will talk about next post, so until next time!

Posted by: PlaidPillagers on 2/03/2010 at 9:00 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink

Tags: breakaway, first, pliad pillagers, robotics

Welcome to the Plaid

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Plaid Pillagers areavoices blog! Now, the Pliad Pillagers will start having their own blog seperate of this soon enough, but what I wanted to do with this blog is to help the greater community understand the purpose and the general overview of the team, so there wont be any talking about tapping holes or crazy math equations. Just plain facts that anyone could understand, so you can better know about us! So, let's start out with the basics!

 

What is FIRST?

 

FIRST is a program started by Dean Kamen in 1989 as an attempt to engage more high school students in Math and Science, two fields that he felt where being overlooked more and more. FIRST is a program where kids have to build a robot (from scratch) that can perform a specific task, while also working with and competiting against other robots performing the same task, all at the same time. Kids are given 6 weeks to build this robot with a kit of parts that is given to them when they learn what their goal (or game) is. There is no instruction book or guide given as to how to build this robot, every team has to come up with their own ideas and design on their own.

 

Now, this is not to say that the kids have to work on their own, all teams are highly encouraged to work with dozens of adult mentors who can assist the kids in several ways. The idea is that kids can go out into the community and find interested professionals who can come and help with brainstorming or the actual building, and by doing this, the kids are able to plant seeds into the community while also making use of one of the greatest skills anyone could learn: how to graciously ask for help.

 

This also leads into another of the prime ideas of FIRST, "Gracious Professionalism". This is the belief that during the competition, the level of sportsmanship is way higher than ever seen before, teams cheer for each other, not a bad word is said, and if you need help repairing your robot during the compeition, you can just go ask any team for help and they will jump up and help you any way they can. Of course, that you would also help other teams is expected as well! This is the core of FIRST, and something that is not seen enough these days.

 

What/Who is P.L.A.I.D.?

 

The Plaid Pillagers are Morris Area High School's FIRST robotics team, and we started compeiting 2 years ago and have competed both years since, each year getting bigger and better. P.L.A.I.D. stands for "in Pursuit of Leadership And Innovative Design", and these are the things in which the team really believes. Our team is divided into 6 departments that all work together to fund, build, ship, program, and design the robot, all under the direction of our team captain and our main adult mentor. We have our own room in the High School, and during the six week build season, you can always find someone in that room day in, day out.

 

I think that that's enough for now, but I will be posting more soon!

Posted by: PlaidPillagers on 1/31/2010 at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags: first, plaid pillagers, robotics