Hi. We won gold at a first-of-a-kind robotics competition! Ask us anything.

how would you have killed John Connor?

Our plan to kill John Connor is spelled out in detail in our source code. Please see GitHub: https://github.com/nomelif/ControlCodesRepo

https://github.com/nomelif/ControlCodesRepo

We couldn’t find any code matching 'kill'

Did you use another term?

Well of course we wouldn't be so blatantly direct about it. The plan is to get John Connor to read the source code. Have you seen lines 181 through 185? Writing a matrix like that is in violation of the Geneva convention, as it can inflict significant bodily harm upon anyone who has the misfortune to read it.

final double[][] engine_vectors = new double[][]{
    new double[]{1, 0},
    new double[]{-0.5,  0.8660254038},
    new double[]{-0.5, -0.8660254038}
};

The lines in question.

You fool! You have exposed Reddit to the infection.

Yeah, but isn't this... like... your insidious goal?
You should thank me.

I am your carrier monkey.

They can't PUBLICLY thank you.

We can not confirm nor deny this.

Would you fuck a synth?

Well, if you mean a synthetiser, at least I am not desperate enough. -team captain

Do any of you participate in an FRC team? If so did you make it to worlds this year?

No, we don't participate in a FRC team. This was our first robotics project ever.

First Global is different than FRC. FRC isn't available to them

Edit: I was wrong! FIRST for all!

FRC very much is available to them, but there would be tremendous startup costs. They would be the first/only Finland team, and would have to travel to compete (Israel, Canada, or one of the many US events are the closest, but China and Australia both have events as well)

Frankly, we haven't studied the question. This would seem a very unlikely scenario though, with the team going separate directions.

Hey Finland! Congrats on winning! As someone who was part of nationals of the FIRST Robotics Challenge, it's incredible that you guys were able to take it. My question: what was your build process Like in terms of designing such a unique robot? Did you have any internal debates on if this 3-wheel design was ever was a good idea? And lastly, do any of you intend to pursue STEM fields in the future?

Well, first we played around with the robot kit and made our first test robot. Then one of us (we don't remember who it was) had the idea to make a threewheeled robot. Everyone was basically excited about the idea, because it made a homomorphic drive train possible. Later we realized, it would be possible with four wheels, which Estonia actually did inspired by us. Our build process was simply building something we thought would be good and then testing and fixing until we didn't find problems.

All the three of us are probably going to study in STEM fields. I (the team captain, Laura) am going to start studying mathematics this fall. The others still have to study for a year at high school. Our high school actually also specializes in STEM. Also, FRC is a different thing than FIRST Global.

Typical Estonians, copying off the Finns. ;)

Well, we gave them our source code. Frankly, their robot was quite different in the end. The only really common part was the homomorphic drive. The collector was different as mostly was the control code (even though some was shared).

Also, they already have a self driving bus in Tallin and passed legislation to allow self driving personal vehicles. They even have some company that sends packages with self driving delivery robots. Holy cow.

What robot girl/guy in pop culture history is the cutest?

We have not come to an agreement between the Borg Queen, Howl's Moving Castle and the terminator. [That is, the terminator in his liquid form.]

The actual castle?

/r/guysfuckingcastles

ftfy r/galsfuckingcastles

source: am girl

What's the most important thing you think a student can do to make the most of the 4 years they can participate as a high school student?

What's the most important thing mentors can do to grow a rookie team fron year to year?

Well, I don't know if there will be more room next year, but I would recommend bringing earplugs. It was very noisy in the pit area where we were supposed to hang out (You had to shout, so someone about half a meter away would hear you). I guess using languages you are learning is quite useful too. Nothing else really comes to mind. We're all first timers and probably next years Team Finland will have completely different members to give everyone a chance to experience FIRST Global. I can't really answer the mentor question. We were a total rookie team; This was the first time we built a robot. Our mentor basically just stood by and let us do our thing.

Team captain Laura

Edit by the programmer:

Bring out your polyglots! I got to speak five languages because of language barriers. There were a frightening number of especially French speaking teams that had to rely on other teams for interpreters. Having at least one team member (even the mentor) speak English is a must. Also, I expect the problem to be smaller next year, as the event is held in Mexico. That way two large languages will be understood by the organizers.

Edit: Not that I would be reluctant to help them, but having to hunt down interpreters for everything does hinder your team's to work efficiently. Big shoutout to all the people who helped other teams with language barriers.

How's the Disc Golf in Finland?

Quite good, there are courses in most places and some quite interesting ones like the Vihti course in a sand pit also exist.

What made you guys choose 3 wheels when nobody else did, and do you think that was part of you winning?

What do you guys plan to do after school (college or profession wise)?

How do you feel about the wish wash that is the perception of AI?

Well, we chose three wheels, so our robot could drive in any direction without turning. This made our robot quite agile, so I think it helped us with winning.

I am going to start studying mathematics at Helsinki University this autumn. The others still have a year of high school left, but they will probably study CS.

I personally think that it is good to make AI's do all kinds of boring tasks, you don't really need humans for, because they might be more accurate and it also means less mindless labor for humans, if that answers your question.

Team Captain, Laura

Frankly, the reason we happened to think of a three wheeler: https://gadgetflow-ycomvalpjriovmn.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Fidget-Spinner-Tri-Spinning-Stress-Reducer-02.jpg

Awesome thanks, one follow up question. With AI do you feel it's dangerous or something humanity should do OK with?

No, I think we can deal with it. Society would have to adapt to there being less jobs though.

Hey, I just graduated from an FRC team. How is First Global different from FRC? I mean, there are lots of international teams in FRC, how is it different?

The FIRST Global Challenge is an annual robotics game that addresses the 14 Grand Challenges identified by the United States of America’s National Academy of Engineering. Each year, a different Grand Challenge will take center stage as the theme of that year’s FIRST Global game, which will be held in a different nation’s capital each year. To underscore the global importance of the 14 Grand Challenges, the engineering academies will host their annual meeting in collaboration with the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge in Washington, DC this July.

FIRST Robotics, LEGO, etc. are just skills-based games. Global actually tackles engineering issues like clean water.

While the theme of this years FIRST Global was clean water, we didn't really solve the world's water problem by sorting balls of various colors.

And actually our strategy didn't even involve sorting. We just delivered everything to the lab.

How many accidents/mishaps did you have building? We tend to always have at least a few.

We had quite a heap of parts break on us:

• An engine
• A servo programmer
• An Omni wheel
• Cables both of data and of power
• Several axes and beams
• Six to seven otgs on the field
• The control tablet
• A heap of screws

On the software side, installing the ide was nontrivial. We went through two Linuxes, one ReactOS, a virtual Windows and finally a physical Windows before we got it to install from a random executable bundle on GitHub. This happened in the middle of the night in a car in the middle of a forest.

One part of the control hub gave us extra fun. The IMU took us several days to figure out. If you look at our code, the variable we use to refer to it is called 'imutus'. That is a derived form of the Finnish word 'imu', sucking. Literally 'imutus' means 'the thing that made something suck'. Our friends over in Estonia made the same assessment (and happen to have a close enough language to match here) and named their IMU the same.

We didn't have any damage inflicted upon us by the parts (except the occasional minor cut), if that is what you meant.

Our FRC bot had a few mishaps, as we broke a 100:1 gearbox, and 2 of our 1/4" drive belts, not to mention a few CNC bits while building. I expect that the Globals teams spent a whole lot more money on replacing parts.

We got off easy: our triangle only needed 75% of everything. Having one of every part crumble in our hands was not a problem, as the kit was engineered for four-wheeled robots.

Could you briefly explain what challenges you had to master? The videos are each 9+ hours long...

Yes, we can. Roughly, we had to sort colored balls from a "river" info multiple reservoirs. Here is the official rule video: https://youtu.be/ceNUHzIwbeg The videos in the "bio" are 9+ hours, but the links point to where the actual action is.

Edit: Probably misread your message. I thought you were asking about the challenge. You can find a quite good list of our difficulties from another of my answers. The root cause is probably that we had no experience with building robots before.

I was part of FIRST and won 2nd place during my time, only due to a teammates technical foul, otherwise we would of gotten gold.

I know my team did a lot of side projects and general shenanigans during downtime both 'safe' and not, what about you guys?

We visited a café and a bookshop. Finns don't do shenanigans.

Programmer's note:

Well, the coffee shop operation did involve storming a Starbucks with a 14-strong (we managed to loose 20 people in the few blocks separating the coffee shop from our dormitory) horde.

Edit:

I just recalled that we spent three hours trying to play "We are number one" on the motors Floppotron style. Turns out that the motor sound is white noise plus coil whine. While the former is uncontrollable in pitch, it can be silenced to make the latter more audible. The coil whine can be modulated to control the sound in the 50-100Hz range. Sadly it is quite a limited set of tonalities to use. What convinced us to give up was that the sound was too weak to be meaningfully recorded.

Does fuel matter?

Fuel? There was no rule regarding imaginary fuel, but we did have some fears regarding real life battery capacity. The batteries were quite weak as they had to travel to the us by airplane => no li-ion. Ours also deteriorated quickly, so we had to charge it all the time when we were not playing. I believed team Gabon had the misfortune to forget to charge their robot at some point and lost a game due to that, though I could very well be mistaken.

Why didn't you clip those cable ties man? :(

They were essential: we used them as rotating combs to collect the balls.

The cable ties act as brushes, keeping the balls in and brushing in more balls.

Do you have a pic of the robot? What sport was this?

Yes, we have a pic. See for example here: https://goo.gl/photos/fXt5YRXh2NzUntdy6 and here: https://goo.gl/photos/Efd4dtWTLQsJM7vKA As for the sport: well, I wouldn't call it so. The point was to sort colored balls into reservoirs. See here for FGC's full explanation: https://youtu.be/ceNUHzIwbeg

At what point did all of you get into robotics, and was this always something you thought you would be doing?

Ah, quite frankly we got into robotics when our headmistress called upon us to. We had prior interest in programming and STEM though.

have you ever been interested in vex or have you even heard of it? it's what I was a part of and whay you're doing now is really cool too

I haven't heard of it.

what song are they playing during your intro?

Darude: Sandstorm, we chose it because it is kind of a meme and Darude is a finnish artist.

Darude - Sandstorm

We would like you to notice we actually got the matching sunglasses too.

What sort of doping control was there? Do you believe your competitors where using performance enhancing drugs?

There was no doping control. None of us used enhancing drugs during the competition, I think. I used a bit of caffeine to stay awake at my summer job during the building process though.

Team captain Laura

is Bender from Futurama the ultimate goal?

No, Howl's Moving Castle is according to our team captain, Laura.

Cool job how did you guys operate in the pressure?

We planned the matches and they were only two and half minutes long, so we didn't have to make many choices under pressure. We were quite pressured by the situation though and our driver actually briefly collapsed after our last match.

Driver's note: by collapsed we mean "his feet didn't carry him", not "passed out" or anything that severe.

Also, we did have one long negotiation and some improvisation. Teams Greece and Brazil had a match with us. We had talks for roughly an hour on our strategy for 2mins and 30s of game time. After having concluded on a second to second game plan we walked into the the arena. Before the world's adoring eyes Brazil and Greece both saw their robots die in the beginning of the game (the technical fail was unpredictable and not their fault). The did manage to make six points before that. We decided our plan had become "Well, fuck it" and improvised. We lost control three times ourselves but did manage to claim victory with a margin of more than ten points. I suspect our opponent had some technical difficulties too, but we had bigger fish to fry at that point.

As someone who is mentoring a very fresh team of local FIRST students what do you think the most helpful things for fresh faces would be?

Would it be teaching them programming, math, engineering concepts, or something different?

Maybe you should just encourage them to use their imagination and make sure they test their robot enough. The robot can be programmed with block code and there is quite little programming needed for a normal FIRST robot. All of us knew how to program beforehand though, so we are not sure if the programming would be easy for someone who has never done that kind of thing before.

From our experience at FGC, teaching your students the virtues of simplicity is valuable too. The repeated cases of overly complicated systems - though requiring brilliance to design - underperforming in a practical setting were quite depressing. Not to say that crazy ideas can't be good: someone went ahead and built a cannon to shoot the balls, which was awesome.

Knowledge of higher mathematics is not required either, but turning mathemathical concepts into physical solutions is a very useful skill in both the software and the hardware side of things.

What is your favorite subreddit and why is it /r/shittyrobots ?

It is now.

My Son is in his Freshman year of High School and has entered the Tech/Engineering home room. He's very bright, and catches on to new ideas quickly. He's 14. What resources are out there that you would recommend so he can have fun while learning outside of a school environment?

Programming is fun, free and useful. You can find documentation for almost any programming language/libraries online. Tutorials are a good starting point, but once you know the basics, reading the documentation is more effective.

Some good programming languages are Python, Elm and Idris. Project Euler has some nice programming tasks, that do not require much code or libraries.

Team programmer's opinion:

Starting from higher level languages and going down from there helps a lot. As for where to find tutorials: the free ones on https://openclassrooms.com were the foundation of my bag of tricks. For python I can recommend the French speaking series (though I believe it has been translated into English) Pythonneries on Eg. YouTube. It has sadly been falling out of date, but it is still mostly viable with new versions of Python.

How does this competition different from the FLL, FTC or FRC competition they do?

First Global is - as the name says - Global. There is a representative from - within the limits of the possible - every country on the world and they are given as equal a chance as possible.

How do you guys go about getting funding,? I'm supposed to be a Captain for my schools first robotics team this year but funding got cut and we are having to look for sponsers.

Our mentor got us funding, so we don't know. I wish you good luck!

Did you get any official recognition in Finland? Congrats from Sauli or Juha Sipilä?

Not really, there was a small article about us in a local newspaper. We got to go to the Finnish embassy in the US though. Also, we are going to show the beast to the mayor.

Hey! Congratulations! I'm a collegiate national champion in the U.S. What programming language(s) did you use?

Java, because we had to

Programmer's note:

What would have made sense would have been to make the robot programmable in the browser with something along the lines of JS. That way the toolchain circus flies out of the window.

Did you interact at all with Team Armenia? I think they got Bronze in one of the events... any thoughts/impressions you'd like to share?

No, we didn't.

Were those Iraqi chicks there?

Yes, they were there. While I am happy for them that they could come at the end (and certain that they deserved it after all they had gone through), it is sad how the media handled it. There was a more or less permanent presence of journalists pestering them. Cheap political points, I guess.

Do you guys have a FIRST team number like say, 88 for example? Or is this something else entirely?

Not as far as we know.

What were the tasks?

See the description. (Updated after your post as this seemed to be a common question)

Here's a link to the official rule video

Cool! I work for a robotics company that provides automation solutions for the foundry, die casting, and forging industries.

What are your thoughts on ABB robotics, considering they have a relatively large presence in central Europe?

I have never heard about it before. We are total robotics noobs. This was our first robotics project ever.

Team captain Laura

What books do you recommend for electronics?

Frankly I don't have much to suggest. However, I feel I have to promote this very good (by the looks of it; I haven't read it) volume by the mentor of the Estonian team: https://www.rahvaraamat.ee/p/robootika-see-on-imelihtne/45289/et?isbn=9789949308897

Gotta say, I love what FIRST does and this tournament seems like it was a fantastic opportunity. What was the biggest challenge in changing from the standard events and this international variation?

also, what made you decide to go with a non traditional 3 wheeled version instead of the seemingly standard 4 wheeled vehicle?

The organisators hadn't planned the event for so many participant, so it was very noisy and cramped in the pit area.

There were many disconnects between the tablets and the robots during the matches, which was claimed to be related to the number of robots present. For example in our third match the two other robots in our alliance were disconnected during the whole match. Those two were –rather conveniently– not shown on the live stream.

We made a three wheeled robot, because we managed to wreck our fourth omniwheel. And because it is homomorphic: we can drive it into any direction without turning it, making it much more agile than the four-wheelers.

Fucking limit switches, amiright?

Yeah, the ball counters were quite shitty. We even saw some negative points.

It's the simplest possible sensor you could put on a robot, and they still manage to get fucked up so much. smh

This was the real theme of the competition. head shaking intensifies

What language did you use from the program?

Java, because we had to

Is that implying you have a preference and if so what is it?

Well, Java is OK. Personally (Théo Friberg) I would have preferred either something without a compilation step (Python or JS that is), or something compiled on the robot itself (thinking along the lines of C/C++), because that would have relieved us of part of the toolchain. The block code was written by connecting a browser to the control hub. That type of a system would have been much more practical. Also, the underlying app code was written so that it experienced memory churn (the heap would fill up every 1-2s), which was yikes. That removed any potential perf benefit against V8 or Python the JVM may have had in theory.

TL;DR: the toolchain for Java was needlessly complicated and painful (and I needlessly stupid while trying to set it up). That is what really got under my skin.

What tips would y'all have for other teams when it comes to building? My team is losing half of our members (seniors) and I'm gonna have to get heavily involved, yet I need to improve a lot of stuff. Y'all have any advice?

Optimize points vs. effort. Make the robot reliable in any situation. Use the features of the robot parts. Automate everything you can.

Programmer / driver on the last point:

I broke my right arm (my better arm) a few weeks before we started to program the beast. I wasn't designated as a driver then, but I thought that we had to prepare for even that eventuality. That's why I designed the robot to be automatic enough to be driven with one hand. (This requirement got loosened when I got better) This payed off on the play field: our agility came from a simple control scheme too. Most other teams had two people on two controllers operating the robot. I see that as a pessimal case: it requires communication that can be cut away with some ahead-of-time planning (at least most of the time).

Assuming you are aware of robot combat in the form of Robot Wars/Battlebots - what sort of combat robot would you build?

I don't know the rules for Robot Wars/Battlebots, but I would make a robot with a big circular spinning blade with the vital parts in the middle, meaning that the opponents would have reach through or under the blade to kill my robot.

Team captain Laura

Could you submit YouTube links which aren't blocked on mobile devices?

They work on my android phone

Was it expensive to make?

Yes, we had to pay for everything in the event (lodging, food, flights and robot parts). Luckily our mentor got us some sponsors and our school paid the rest.

Were you using performance enhancing drugs to secure the win?

No, why are you asking?

My high school started a robotics club when I was there back in 07. I was never in it, but it was a really cool club that made badass robots. It seems to have picked up in popularity since then, which is neat to see.

My question: what is the most frustrating part of building a robot from start to finish?

The robot kit was extremely annoying. Sometimes parts broke or the right kind of bracket was nowhere to be found. (Read: triangular symmetry without 60 deg brackets...) And don't get me started on all the screwing involved. Also the programming environment was a pain to set up.

This is the only robot we have built so far.

What's your favourite type of cheese?

I believe our team captain has a moral aversion to the stuff. I, as the programmer, have to go with some Saint Agur -type blue, Mimolette or the Finnish barely-a-cheese Kainuunjuusto. The thing is a 30cm in diameter by 2cm thick yellow-with-black-spots disc you put in the oven and pour cloudberries on. It does squeak weirdly when eaten. (Owing it its nickname "squeaky cheese")

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Leipäjuusto_cheese_with_cloudberry_jam.jpg/1200px-Leipäjuusto_cheese_with_cloudberry_jam.jpg

What do i have to learn to become like you guys?

Use maths and programming to solve problems.

Have any of you met the hydraulic press Channel guy?

(Un)fortunately not.

What's more rewarding: Robotics competition gold or reddit gold?

We've not gathered sufficient amounts of data on the latter one. ;) The former one had a striking resemblance with a grey metal leaf-plated with brass.

First off I want to congratulate your team for your success this season. I have had experience in FRC FTC and as an online GSC mentor for one of the FIRST Global teams.

Does your team want to expand Into any other FIRST competitions in the future such as FRC or FTC? I would love for FIRST Global to grow into a gateway program to FRC and FTC to help grow the number of international teams in those league.

Also do you or any other FIRST Global teams plan on conducting your own STEM outreach events within your respective countries sometime in the future? These events typically are the best way to grow STEM communities.

Also I'm curious, are there many robotics leagues other than FIRST internationally? And if so, how do they compare?

Does your team want to expand Into any other FIRST competitions in the future such as FRC or FTC? I would love for FIRST Global to grow into a gateway program to FRC and FTC to help grow the number of international teams in those league.

We don't know yet. Maybe.

Also do you or any other FIRST Global teams plan on conducting your own STEM outreach events within your respective countries sometime in the future? These events typically are the best way to grow STEM communities.

We are not planning such events and we don't know about other teams. I don't think traditional STEM outreach events are very effective. However the finnish Science Teacher's Association organizes contests in physics, maths, chem and programming. They have given rise to STEM communities.

Also I'm curious, are there many robotics leagues other than FIRST internationally? And if so, how do they compare?

We don't know, we are total robotics noobs.

Also, thank you for the congrats.

Hey, a competer in FLL here, do you have any advice on how to prep for the transition between FLL and FTC?

We haven't participated in FLL contests.

[deleted]

According to our top-notch scientists the number of cats is not decreased over them being deceased. For now there are only seven instead of eight, who each other still do hate.

Can your robot fuck coconuts??

Well, I guess it could teabag them and it would be safer than humans fucking coconuts.

What is it like to know you will all be 40 year old virgins?

This reminds me so much of this cartoon...

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/17/af/22/17af220cca3d47405864211b01484b5c--smile.jpg

Translation:

[Somewhere in the middle East]

• Ah, they got me...
• 72 virgins are waiting for you in heaven