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Hello, Robolions team members, mentors, friends, and community members! Welcome to "The Fourth Law of Robotics," home to University City High School's FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Team. We hope to use this blog to inform you about what we're up to.
We compete in the FRC (First Robotics Competition), an annual competition where we have six weeks to build a robot from scratch. This year's game is Recycle Rush. We'll post updates here to let you all know what we're up to with building (and competing with) our robot!
We also are now competing in FTC (First Tech Challenge), the next level down from FRC. The game was called Ring It Up!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

We're Live!

This is Grace writing, and my introduction isn't half as cool as Daniel's, which he is writing and posting as I type. You see, we're working on this from two different computers, at the same time, which can at times be confusing (for both us and blogger...) Anyways, we're a FIRST robotics team, which is cool. You can read all about it in Dan's post. I just wanted to say that you can find out more about FIRST through the FIRST website, http://www.usfirst.org/.

Our blog name, The Fourth Law of Robotics, is (if you haven't already gotten the reference, in which case you should reconsider reading this blog.) a reference to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics which state:
  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
We thought it would be a clever name. But it turns out there actually IS a fourth law- well, technically a zeroth law, which Asimov later added to precede the other three. It states:
  1. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
I guess that's good. We wouldn't want our robot to take over humanity. Or any robot, for that matter.

Also as I am writing, the awesome guys who actually do the work around here are testing the pnuematics systems we are going to use for our robot (who is yet to be named). We keep hearing big blasts of air from the other room. But we really appreciate them, because without the people who are smart and awesome and build the robot, me and Dan wouldn't have jobs. You see, we're the computer people- he does programming, and I do PR and marketing along with other random stuff.

So yeah.

I'll end my rambling now; we just tested the air system that's going to be used for the arm, and there are still some kinks to be worked out, but it's getting there! Woohoo!
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