Last Saturday, students, mentors, alumni, parents, and supporters of Texas Torque met up in The Woodlands College Park High School LGI to watch the FIRST Robotics Competition 2019 game reveal. This much-anticipated webcast revealed the year’s challenge and marked the beginning of the new FRC season, DESTINATION: DEEP SPACE.

The 2019 competition involves a space themed game in which two teams of three robots compete to grab disk shaped “hatch” panels to place on a “rocket” or a “cargo ship”, then place “cargo” kickballs afterward. In the first 15 seconds of the game, a sandstorm, or black curtain, is lowered in front of the drive teams, instead of the autonomous periods in past years. At this time, teams can control the robot using visual feedback from the robot and its cameras and sensors. After the initial sandstorm, the curtain is then raised for the tele-operated period. In the last 20 seconds of the match, teams return their robots to the habitat platform and scale different levels of steps to gain additional points.

The following video released by FIRST further explains the challenge.

Following the exciting reveal, Torque members spent the next few hours brainstorming and discussing design and strategy for the game. Students collaborated with mentors and alumni to come up with prototype ideas and strategies to maximize match scores. For the next six weeks, team members will work to design, prototype, construct, and program a new robot for the season before the seven week competition season begins.

Texas Torque wishes all teams the best of luck and hopes that everyone has fun this season!