
Ask HN: Why aren't student robots way more advanced? - tomcam
You can get a hell of a lot of smarts into robot-sized packages these days. Any smartphone has thousands of times the CPU power and I&#x2F;O capabilities of an Arduino.<p>Why are students still doing line following bots and stupid R&#x2F;C battles? Why isn&#x27;t there a rapidly accreting standard library of robotics with robust image recognition, speech recognition, navigation features, and so on? Seems to me that your average FIRST design by this time should be downright impressive.
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maceurt
The problem with FIRST is all the rules associated with the competitions. You
are limited on how much money you can spend on a robot, you are limited on how
much your robot weigh's and its size, and you are limited on the rules of the
game. Furthermore, the build season of FIRST is I think only around 2 months
from when they find out the rules of the game and from when teams have to pack
up their robots and send them to competitions. Most teams struggle to even
have core functionality working on their robot in time Furthermore, the most
common software used to program the robots is Labview, which limits what you
can actually do with your robot significantly.

FIRST robotic's goal is not to innovate on robot design as much as it is to
provide a large audience of students to STEM fields.

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tomcam
Perfect explanation. Thanks.

