The Mid-Atlantic Robotics 2014 FRC season- Aerial Assist- is underway! Congratulations to all 78 teams that competed at Hatboro-Horsham and Mt. Olive- the first week of any new season brings some start-up challenges, and we may have gotten more than our share this year. Despite technical problems and the threat of nasty weather, our event coordinators and volunteers got the job done.
FIRST® AERIAL ASSISTSM 2014 Robotics Game Unveiled
MANCHESTER, N.H., January 4, 2014― Inventor and FIRST® Founder Dean Kamen launched the 2014 FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC®) season today with the Kickoff of a new robotics game called AERIAL ASSISTSM before a crowd of 400 people at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, N.H., hometown of FIRST Headquarters. Nearly 70,000 high-school students on more than 2,700 teams in 92 cities around the globe joined the 2014 Kickoff via live NASA-TV broadcast and webcast.
“The students who participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition are not only building robots; they are building character, self-respect, and relationships with their peers,” said Dean Kamen, president of DEKA Research & Development and FIRST Founder, adding, “Winning the game is fun, but the importance of FIRST is that you’ll get much more out of it than you put in, and it’s going to change the rest of your life.”
The 2014 game, AERIAL ASSIST, is played by two Alliances of three teams each. Alliances compete by trying to score as many balls in goals as possible during a two-minute and 30-second match. Additional points are earned by robots working together to score goals, and by throwing and catching balls over a truss suspended just over five feet above the floor as they move the ball down the field.