Robotics comes FIRST for Rockwell Automation

Rockwell Automation has sponsored the biggest FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) tournament in Australia to date. FIRST recently held the Asia Pacific Open FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Championship and Invitational FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) in Sydney.

More than 60 teams from 20 countries travelled to compete at Macquarie University in Sydney. Teams were selected by the FIRST authorities in their respective countries.

Rockwell Automation is one of the key global partners for FIRST at the international level and was recently given the Founder’s award for its continuing sponsorship of FIRST at the World Championships in St Louis, USA. Over the last two years, Rockwell Automation has sponsored the FIRST program in Australia and New Zealand.

FIRST winning teams Thunder Down Under and Curtin Robotics.

“Our local sponsorship of the FIRST program builds on a longstanding relationship between the two organisations in the United States,” said Mauro DelleMonache, marketing director at Rockwell Automation.

“Organisations are pointing to technology to revitalise manufacturing, which is becoming increasingly automated. We have an ageing population, which means that a lot of inherent knowledge will be moving on soon. The work that FIRST does is an important step towards addressing the need for the next generation for tomorrow’s workforce.”

“The biggest thing that Rockwell Automation does for the program is provide their endorsement,” said Professor Michael Heimlich from Macquarie University’s Faculty of Science, who coordinates FIRST in Australia. “FIRST is about encouraging students to study a science, technology, engineering and maths field at university and we do this by showing them how exciting these fields are - building robots is really just the vehicle for accomplishing the FIRST mission.”

The top awards in both robot performance and overall excellence at the Asia Pacific Invitational went to teams from the US. The overall excellence award was won by Team Beta from Iowa, which has been instrumental in working with Macquarie’s FIRST team, Thunder Down Under, to create a virtual FTC technology to allow outback Australian teams to participate in national tournaments.

There were two teams from Australia competing in the FTC portion of the event. The Think Award was won by a team called FTC=MAS^FUN (pronounced “F-T-C equals mass to the power of fun”) for its engineering notebook and gracious professionalism - the cornerstone FIRST core value.

The Champions Award, which is the top award for the FIRST LEGO League, went to a team from India and the top robot performance award went to a Chinese team that set the world record for the best robot score. Three teams from Australia participated in the competition and Wollongong’s Project Bucephalus won an award for its technical accomplishments in programming the robot.

The FIRST Robotic Challenge (FRC) - Duel Down Under - was round one of the API, where teams put their robots to the test in a game of Ultimate Frisbee. The robot game was won by an alliance composed of the Thunder Down Under team and the Curtin University team, Curtin Robotics, with their robots Ikara and Taurus. Thunder Down Under is the original FRC Team in Australia and is hosted by Macquarie University and sponsored by Rockwell Automation. The top overall award was won by Team Melbourne for its contribution to growing FIRST in the Melbourne area.