RoboCon

For those of you who don't know, I (Ana) was a part of FIRST Robotics through high school and college, and would likely still be working with teams today if I weren't in Japan.  However, being in Japan, there is a different robotics competition for me to cheer my head off at, RoboCon.  The RoboCon name is a shortening of Robot Contest like Pokemon is a shortening of Pocket Monsters¹. This competition is sponsored by NHK, the nationwide television broadcasting company.  There are many levels, for different students and school systems.  I teach for a Technical College, of which there are 62 in all of Japan, and we are in the Hokuriku region, so I went to Toyota City with our teams to watch the Hokuriku regional RoboCon. 

Each Technical College has two teams, an A team and a B team.  Typically, the A team is a group of seniors working on their capstone project, while the B team is anyone else in the school who would like to participate.  There are 124 teams total in the Technical College RoboCon, and 10 schools, with 20 teams, were at the regional.

The pits, or robot holding/working on area

It starts like any FIRST regional.  You walk in with your team when the doors open, everyone sits down in a section of the bleachers, and the field is already set up.  Typical FIRST teams have t-shirts for everyone on their team, while here, the schools have a box of Happi coat style or plain jackets with the school name on them that the students in the bleachers wear for the competition, but return at the end of the day.  The students that are back in the pits with the robots are given their own special team t-shirts as they have invested a lot more time and energy.  Here, instead of rushing to grab good seats, each school has an assigned section of bleachers and any non-affiliated watchers or parents sit up in the back.

Milling about, getting ready!

As this is broadcast, put on, and paid for by the television station, many aspects of the show are canned.  A man comes up at the beginning to tell everyone to keep their cell phones off so they don't mess with the robot controls or TV reception, and gives the general rules.  At the beginning of each match, the audience must hold up the appropriate number of fingers while counting down from three (san...ni...ichi...) and then raise a fist in the air and shout "Staaaato!" (start) to kick off the counter.  Any time the man from the beginning, who sat at the judges' table, waves his hand, you must cheer.  There may have been more rules, like it may have been mandatory that the cheering sections for each team on the field must all stand and others should remain seated, but I caught the first three from his opening speech.

See the blurry hand signaling to cheer? And KTC's eye-melting neon yellow coats?

Once the audience was prepped and it was time to roll camera, the male and female emcees came to the field and gave their opening spiel.  They had a little girl and a little boy from the audience help them to demonstrate the rules of the game, acting as robots themselves.  As for game rules, they were simple, as compared to many FIRST competitions, but a heck of a lot more boring as well.  The basic idea is that a bipedal "horse" robot walks across the field in one direction, in a straight line.  Then, the robot's power is cut, a "chariot" robot is attached to the "horse", and the robot goes back across the same field in the other direction, towing the chariot with a person in it.  The robot must hang a giant cardboard or foam key on a ring above the field this second trip. That's it. The robots only have to turn once, no autonomous action, no direction interaction with competing robots...not much is being asked except that bipedal motion probably verges on unreasonably hard for student teams.  FIRST tends to ask for a lot more and only gives six weeks to make the robot, and then pits the teams against each other in more exciting styles of competition.  See this link for more info about this year's FIRST competition.

More details from the Japanese competition: the students had about 30 seconds to set up their half of the field any way they wanted it.  They had ladders so they could turn the rings hanging in the center to a position their robot could use, they could make last-minute robot adjustments, and by the end, they had to have the "horse" robot at its starting line and the "chariot" robot (containing the human player who controlled the robot) at its starting area.

Emcees explaining the rules

Once the audience yelled "Staaato!" the robots started walking across the field.  If they made it, flags waved as the power was cut and the students attached the "chariot".  Once it was ready and people were clear of the field, the flag was waved again so the robot could head back to its starting area.  On the way, it must drop off a key into the ring hanging in the middle of the field before fully crossing the finish line, all in under 3 minutes and faster than their opponent.  Better do well, as it is a single-elimination competition and you potentially have only one shot to do well or fail.

KTC B Team, "horse" and "chariot"

For the first matches, the judges needed to see all aspects of the robot's capabilities to judge them for various design awards.  The teams were given the full three minutes and if a team didn't finish for whatever reason, it was allowed to show off any skills that were not seen already, like attaching to the "chariot" and placing the key into the ring.  Once all teams had been on the field, future matches were stopped as soon as one team crossed the finish line.  Many matches had obvious winners, where only one team made it to the finish line during the entire three minute period.

Another big part of the competition is robot theme.  Two teams (including our B team) had Christmas themed robots, with a Rudolf the Reindeer "horse" robot and a sleigh (with 3 Santas for us - missing the point, guys!), other teams had traditional Japanese floats, one was really cool and had a motorcycle "chariot" while the walking robot was turned on its side and had wheels for the return trip.

One odd aspect of the competition, I thought, was that the students are allowed to stop if their robot is having a problem, and bring it back to specified reset points.  If they connected it wrong and have it at an angle it can't recover from, they can stop, put it back into the starting block, and keep going.  The timer does keep counting, allowing the other team to get further, and because the two robots are in totally separate zones it's not a safety hazard, but it seems odd to me.  I suppose I'm more used to the "coopertition" of FIRST, and there your robot is either ready, or it sits dead and/or fallen on the field through the match.

Our teams did quite well, each winning two matches before losing a third.  The A team started with a bye round and got to the final four, and the B team was in the final eight.  That was the most exciting match of the entire game, with our B team losing by about three inches.  If their robot was a little faster or if they weren't the only team to carry three people instead of just one, they would have gotten it.  The A team knocked an important string out of alignment while attaching the two parts during their final match, but would have won otherwise.  I don't think either team would have won the competition had they made it further, but they did well and we're proud of them.

(There would be a video here but Blogger is not playing nice.  See it here)

Each regional gets to send 4 teams on to the national competition.  The competition winner goes.  One would think that the second through fourth places would go as well, or at least the second place team would also get to go, but that's not necessarily so.  The judges choose the other three teams based on various reasons, including how they'd fare in the design competitions on a national level.  Both of our teams won design awards, but the B team won two awards and was given the opportunity to attend nationals.  I'll be cheering them on (and knitting in the stands) in Tokyo in late November.  Lee and I think it is pretty silly to send 3/4 of teams onward based on judges picks and how good their theme is - and very Japanese.  In this case, one team was sent to nationals that was in no way functional for their regional competition, but had a lot of cool ideas that the judges liked.  That's just unfair to teams that had robots that could actually compete.

Awards Ceremony

For the parameters of the competition, it's a good program.  Specifically for Technical Colleges, available as a senior project (and therefore 6 months instead of the 6 week FIRST schedule), with a few more deliverables and a lot more self-reliance, it's a good competition.  I don't think either FIRST or RoboCon are the end-all, be-all of robotics competitions, but I do think it's great to have kids involved in such programs.  Can't wait to see what's in store in Tokyo!



1. The Japanese language is based on syllables, not letters, so Japanese acronyms tend to be syllable based rather than letters or initials. Like Kentucky Fried Chicken in the US is KFC, whereas here it's Kentuck. Highly amusing video about such things can be found here.