FRC Live – Upcoming Technologies, What’s on the Horizon

Good Morning Teams,

Thursday afternoon at Championship, with the help of Kate Pilotte, Kit of Parts (KOP) Engineer, I hosted FRC Live – Upcoming Technologies, What’s on the Horizon.  Here’s what we talked about:

Introducing Kate took a few minutes because she is the entire Kit of Parts organization at FIRST.  She is in charge of:

• Supplier selection
• Acquisition of Kit of Part components
• Transportation of components to our warehouse
• Storage
• Kitting (turning the piles of kit of part components into individual team kits)
• New technologies
• Supplier Showcase at Championship
• Donation management
• Supplier recognition
• Missing parts follow up
• Team kit of parts survey
• Supplier Summit

Plus in her spare time she is a member of the Game Design Committee (GDC) and a FIRST Technical Advisor (FTA)

Kate and I briefly showed the FRC Technology Roadmap that currently extends past 2013.  The plan we have here at FIRST for the future of FRC includes software, controls, sensors, manipulators, drive train and power among many other things.  I explained to the crowd that we can’t be too specific about the details of our Roadmap in public forums because that would weaken our bargaining power with suppliers.  Plus, we don’t want to leak information on future games and we know there are other organizations that would love to copy our success, if only they knew how we do it.

Kate described the juggling act she performs every year as she tries to balance donated, discounted and full price items to create a cohesive kit while still staying on budget.  Kate has to order parts far enough in advance to ensure they are manufactured in time and still be flexible if the GDC changes their minds.  Sometimes we just can’t get what we want.  Kate tried to find brushless motors for the 2010 game, but wasn’t able to find the right voltage for a decent price so we had to do without.

Kate’s job gets bigger every year as more FRC teams come onboard.  Once the items for the Kit of Parts arrive at our warehouse, Kate has to ensure they are repackaged into team kits.  The warehouse staff set up a ‘sea’ of red and blue totes in December and spend days working their way up and down the rows placing one sensor panel then two magnetic encoders then four 40 amp circuit breakers then 8 wheel bearings in each.  When the rookie kits are done, Kate and her helpers have to set up the wave after wave of veteran kits and repeat the process.

A huge hit to the kit of parts budget every year is shipping.  FRC not only pays to have kit components shipped to our warehouse for kitting, we also pay to ship the kits to kickoffs.  Yes, once upon a time, FedEx donated KOP shipping, but as FRC grew, FedEx limited their donation to robot shipping and FRC took on the cost of shipping kits ourselves. 

As FRC continues to grow, the KOP process and budget will be stretched to the limit so we’re taking another look at the process in hopes of making FRC scalable.  In the near future, we plan to continue to recycle some KOP components in 2011.  If anything significant changes, I’ll let you know.

I hope to see you at FRC Live next year.

262 days to Kickoff
See you then!