The FIRST® Robotics Competition 2023 season has just begun. My team (FRC Team 341, Miss Daisy) has spent the last two months building the robot for the 2023 game CHARGED UP. Last weekend, our operators tried out our brand new robot on a regulation field, and it performed well.
Our team will participate in two district competitions in March: Hatboro Horsham District Competition this weekend, and Springside-Chestnut Hill District Competition two weeks later. If we perform well, we get to advance to Mid-Atlantic District Championship in early April where the competition is always fierce. From there, the final step is the FIRST® World Championship in Houston in later April which would be very exciting to attend.
At each competition, there is a qualification round and a play-off round. During the qualification round, each team is randomly assigned with two other teams to constitute an alliance and compete with another randomly constituted alliance in each match. Ranking points are earned by each team based on performance in individual games. At the end of the qualification round, the top ranked teams get to choose alliance partners to compete in the next round. A total of 8 such alliances face each other in the play-off round to determine the best alliance.
A lot of performance data for each team is collected by FRC itself and our own team’s scouting operations. Last year, I helped manually collect scouting data and transcribe the information to an online database. Now, I am working on a data science project where I hope to find out whether earlier performances can be used to predict later performances.
I’m excited for the new competition season, and hope our new robot will carry us to the World Championship. I’m also hopeful that my data science project can help our team with choosing alliance partners in the future.
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