US FIRST Robotics Uses App Inventor to Design Robot Controllers
Jan 21, 2016 karen's Blog
This is a guest post by Thomas Eng, US FIRST
FIRST is a non-profit organization, founded by inventor Dean Kamen, with a mission to inspire young people to pursue careers in science and technology. FIRST engages children with exciting, Mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.
The FIRST Tech Challenge group organizes robotics competitions for children in grades 7 through 12. Teams build robots from a kit of parts. Teams use these robots to compete in themed competitions around the world. For 2015-2016 season, teams are building robots to compete in the official FIRST Res-Q game, which models its challenges after mountain rescue situations.
Each team uses an Android Smartphone as the primary controller for their competition robot. Teams can use a special branch of the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor to program their robot controllers and to create customized behaviors for their competition bots.
Teams can use the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor to design their robot controller apps using special FTC-specific design components. These FTC-specific design components allow the users to communicate with and control the hardware devices (motors, servos and sensors) that are installed on a robot. The FTC-specific design blocks were implemented by an engineer from Google, Liz Looney, who was introduced to FIRST by Hal Abelson and his CSAIL team from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ.
Because teams often do not have access to the Cloud at the competition venues for the FIRST Tech Challenge events, a solution was implemented that allows teams to run the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor locally, on their team laptops, using VirtualBox. Teams design and build their robot controller apps with their local ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor servers, and then the transfer and install them (typically using a USB cable) to their Android smartphones.
The ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor has been very well received by the FIRST community. App Inventors user friendly, visual interface and the easy-to-understand Blockly programming language makes the programming tasks more accessible and manageable, especially for novice programmers.
The ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor has been a particularly huge hit in the under-served areas The students were joyful that they now had been empowered to make the robot move by themselves. Thank-you.
Keith Hall
FIRST Senior Mentor, Indiana
For more information about the FIRST Tech Challenge visit the following link: http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/ftc For more information about FIRST, visit the official FIRST website: http://www.firstinspires.org/