What is FRC?
What is FRC?
FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international engineering challenge. Every January, FIRST releases a new game — think full-court basketball or capture-the-flag, but with 120-pound robots. Teams have six weeks to design, build, and program a robot that can compete in that game.
Team 498 Cobras has competed since 2000. Every robot you’ll see in the shop was designed, manufactured, and coded by students.
How a match works
Each match puts six robots on the field — three on the blue alliance, three on the red alliance. A match has two phases:
Autonomous (first 15 seconds) — your robot runs entirely on pre-programmed code with no driver input. It navigates the field, scores points, and positions itself using only sensors and the program you wrote.
Teleoperated (remaining 2 minutes 15 seconds) — drivers control the robot using joysticks, but your code is still running. The driver input is just data coming in — your program decides what to do with it.
During both autonomous and teleop, your code is running fifty times per second. Every motor move, every sensor check, every decision — it’s all your program.
What programming actually controls
Every FRC robot needs code for at least three things:
1. Drivetrain — moving across the field. This ranges from a simple two-motor tank drive to a complex four-module swerve system that can move in any direction without rotating.
2. Mechanisms — arms, intakes, shooters, climbers. Each has motors that need to be told when to run, how fast, and when to stop. They have sensors that measure position, force, or the presence of a game piece.
3. Autonomy — the robot deciding where to go and what to do without driver input. In FRC this ranges from a simple “drive forward 2 meters” to following a pre-planned trajectory that scores multiple game pieces in 15 seconds.
The programming team’s job
The mechanical team builds the robot. The electrical team wires it. The programming team makes it move.
That means:
- Writing code to map joystick inputs to motor commands
- Tuning control loops so mechanisms hit exact positions reliably
- Writing autonomous routines that score points in the first 15 seconds
- Debugging at 11pm the night before a competition when something stops working
You don’t need to know anything about robots or Java to start here. Every concept in this curriculum builds from zero — the only prerequisite is curiosity and willingness to trace through code step by step.
What this curriculum covers
This curriculum teaches FRC programming from first principles. You’ll start with what a program actually is (Lesson 01 of Fundamentals) and build toward the full control systems that make a competitive robot.
The tracks are roughly ordered by when you’ll need each topic on a real robot:
- FRC Intro — What you’re looking at, what’s connected to what
- Fundamentals — How programs work, variables, loops, logic, state
- Robot Code — WPILib, subsystems, command-based architecture
- Motion & Control — PID controllers for precise positioning
- Sensing & Vision — Cameras, AprilTags, knowing where you are on the field
- Autonomy — Planning and executing complex auto routines
- Swerve Drive — The dominant drivetrain in modern FRC
What’s next
In Lesson 02, we’ll look at the actual hardware on an FRC robot — what components exist, how they communicate, and what your code is actually talking to when you call motor.set(0.5).