Kinect Used To Play Rebound Rumble At FIRST Robotics Competition

Students of 12 countries forming 2500 teams participated in this year's FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition and their challenge was building robots in six weeks to perform given tasks. The students participating in this competition were from grade 9 to 12.

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This year the students were provided with kits to build their robots which included more than 600 individual components including the Kinect hardware and Kinect for Windows SDK. The teams had to control their robots using joystick and gesture & speech capabilities of Kinect. At the beginning of the competition the students were allowed to control the robots only using Kinect by gestures and commands. For understanding Kinect and the technology involved in working with it, workshops were held in various places which involved training students to program their robots using C++ and C#. Microsoft stores at various places also teamed up with robotics teams to provide support for Kinect.

Participating students will be gaining programming, designing and strategic project planning experience from professionals. The winning teams and other participants would receive more than $15 million as college scholarships.

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An image of the play area

This year the task will be playing Rebound Rumble, which is somewhat like Basketball, where the robots will be controlled from outside the court using joystick and Kinect. The robots have to throw the balls at the nets which have been lined up in three layers and the teams would score based on the balls put in the nets.

An animated demonstration of the game is shown below:



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