The Game: "Lunacy"

The 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition game, Lunacy, celebrates NASA's 40 year anniversary of Apollo 11's mission.

Lunacy is played on a 27X54 ft. field, called the crater, with teams located in their bases at each end. Two other "outposts" with human "payload specialists" are located on the sides. The floor and wheels are covered in polymer material called Regolith that makes it slippery, making crashes frequent. There are three types of game pieces: moon balls, empty cells, and super cells. Attached to each robot is a trailer, which serve as scoring mechanisms for opposing alliances. To win, you have to shoot balls into opposing trailers. Each robot starts the game holding up to 7 moon rocks in their possession, with their trailer touching the wall of the crater on an opponent's base. During autonomous mode, human players shoot moon rocks into opposing trailers, while robots can try to hold other robots, making them easy targets. The robots can also target optical targets on opposing robots and shoot moon rocks into opponents' trailers. At the end of autonomous, human players step forward and take control of their robot for the tele-operated period. During this period, payload specialists and robots try to score in opposite trailers, 2 points for each moon rock. Robots can also recycle game pieces. Robots can also retrieve empty cells from payload specialists, which then are exchanged for "super cells." These then can be shot into opposing trailers for 15 points.

What is FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC)?

Have you ever wanted to design & build a robot, learn from experienced engineers and rocket scientists, or just play with power tools? Welcome to FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), where students work alongside experienced mentors to design, build, program, and compete with robots to play a game. Along the way, teams act with "Gracious Professionalism," or the spirit of helping your opponents while competing against them. "It's like the WWE, for nerds," commented George Bush Senior. For six weeks, teams busy themselves in making a robot, while learning new skills along the way. Then, after the jam-packed build season, teams attend regionals to pit their robot against each other, hoping to get to the finals in Atlanta, Georgia. Competition is fierce, but so are the relationships, lessons, and spirit in the teams.

FRC stands for FIRST Robotics Competition. At this level, high school students start with a kit of parts and the official Game definition for the season. They work with mentors from industry to decide how they want to participate in the game and what capabilities they want to build into their machine. Maybe they will choose to play defense, or to "run" the playing field. Or perhaps they will choose to be a "thrower" or a "catcher" instead of a "runner". Once the objectives are defined, the students and mentors work together to design and build the parts for each objective, and to assemble them all together into a single robot that plays within the rules that FIRST has set for the season.

But a FIRST team isn't just about being a mechanic and building a machine. Some students will choose to focus on programming the robot, or building the crate for shipping, fund-raising for the team, or building a web site to share the teams progress with the world. And, a FIRST team isn't just about the robot; it's about the people who build the robot. There are so many things to do on a FIRST team! There's leadership, new skills to develop, friends to have fun with and to accomplish a challenging goal with.

Check out what Team 2449's students are doing:

And, for more official info, go to FIRST's web site.