FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)

In 2005 FIRST, inspired by the rapidly growing success in their FRC program, created this program; however it was originally called the FVC. FVC was an initialism for FIRST Vex Challenge, but was renamed to the FIRST Tech Challenge in 2008 when the kit or parts was changed. The FIRST Tech challenge is similar to the FIRST Robotics Competition in most regards, but is scaled down to reduce the initial cost and knowledge overhead. The main goal of FIRST's FTC challenge is to bring a smaller version of the FIRST Robotics Competition to younger high school students who may be intimidated by the comparably more complicated FRC. The FIRST Tech Challenge is intended to also help bridge the gap between the middle school oriented FIRST Lego League competitions with the smaller Lego robots, and the large complicated robots in the FRC.

The Robots

As mentioned above the FTC robots are intended to be a smaller scale version of the FRC robots. The robots tend to be larger than FLL robots, but much smaller than FRC robots. Unlike the FRC robots there the pool of materials that you can build your robot from in FTC is much more restricted.

Currently FTC robots are built primarily from the TETRIX robot parts and incorporate the same computer from the Lego MINDSTORMS robots. Robots can be programed in a few languages including RobotC and LabVIEW, both computer programming languages aimed at making it easier for students to understand and program robots than traditional programming languages.

For the first two years of FTC's life it was called the FVC, FIRST VEX Challenge. During this period of time the robots were built using VEX parts which are very similar to TETRIX parts.

Although both types of robots may look different, their purposes are always the same. They, just like the FRC robots, built to be competition robots. Just like in FRC they must manipulate game objects using moving parts to accomplish some game introduced by FIRST each year. FTC robots because they are smaller and less complicated than their FRC older brother robots can be built faster. They also use aluminum parts and Lego sensors to accomplish mush of the same purposes FRC robots can do.

Competitions

Competitions in a FIRST Tech Challenge are structured similar to their FRC big brother competitions

The largest difference is that competitions tend to be 2 robots vs. 2 robots, and the arenas that they compete in tend to be a box instead of a rectangle. Also, due to the FTC robots being small compared to the FRC robots, the game pieces or parts of the game field may be mush larger in comparison to the FTC robots.

Also lifted from FIRST Robotics Competitions is an autonomous mode at the beginning of the match. Also lifted from FRC is that at the end of FTC matches robots may accomplish some new game objective by the end of the match to earn extra points.

If you are still interested in FTC you can learn much more on FIRST's website.