Continuing with its mission to provide every day opportunities for students to develop real-world engineering skills, and to build on the importance of designing smart, connected products to take advantage of the Internet of Things, PTC, today announced it will be donating PTC Thingworx® software to all FIRST teams in addition to PTC Creo®, PTC Mathcad® and PTC Windchill® software. PTC ThingWorx can be used to create an application which displays data collected by sensors on the robot in order to tell teams how it is performing, and what type of adjustments may be needed.
The number of things connected to the Internet now exceeds the total number of humans on the planet, and this is accelerating to as many as 50 billion connected devices by the end of the decade. The implications of this emerging Internet of Things (IoT) are huge, including how smart, connected products are designed, built and serviced.
“Manufacturers are addressing the new IoT business model by building smart, connected products and need to hire people with these specific skills to remain competitive,” said John Stuart, senior vice president global education, PTC. “PTC is excited to work with FIRST to develop the IoT engineers and innovators of tomorrow. We’re proud to continue our support of FIRST and we wish the best for all the teams that participate in this year’s competition.”
PTC, NASA, and Comcast NBCUniversal were the 2015 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Kickoff Sponsors at an event that was held on Saturday, January 3, 2015 at 10:15am eastern. The FRC season robotics game was unveiled during a live broadcast courtesy of Comcast NBCUniversal.
Building on previous years, PTC will support ten regional and district FRC competitions throughout the United States and Israel in addition to sponsoring 87 FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC®) teams, 130 FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC®) teams, and five FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL®) teams during the 2014-2015 season.
