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By Matt Ausman | May 5, 2026
From the Competition Floor to the Frontline: Nurturing Tomorrow’s Innovators
The air at a FIRST® Robotics competition crackles with a unique energy. You feel a powerful mix of excitement, intense focus, and pure ingenuity. I recently had the pleasure of attending a Georgia FIRST Robotics competition and what I saw confirmed what I have always believed: the seeds of future innovation in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) live within these young minds.
Their passion for solving complex problems mirrors the very drive that powers our teams at Zebra Technologies. We see a reflection of our own commitment to creating solutions that empower people and improve how work gets done. It highlights a core part of our mission, making work better for organizations, their employees, and everyone they serve.
Solving for a Pressing Challenge
Behind the impressive spectacle of battling robots lies a significant logistical puzzle. Teams of volunteers, known as queuers, work tirelessly to ensure the right robots get to the right arena at precisely the right time.
This manual process, often managed with clipboards and person to person instructions, presents a real-world test of coordination and efficiency under pressure. A delay or a mix-up can impact a team’s chances in the competition they worked all season to reach. This situation perfectly illustrates the need for optimized workflows and real-time insight, challenges our customers face every day on a much larger scale.
Innovation in Action
Seeing this challenge, a talented group from our own IT Development Program (ITDP) stepped up. These participants, Jeff Luo, Summer Wang, Anika Chatterjee, all early in their technology careers, embraced the opportunity to apply their skills to a cause they felt passionate about. They volunteered to develop a solution that would bring clarity and efficiency to the competition floor.
Using RFID technology, our team created a system that provides instant asset visibility. Each robot receives a tag, handheld readers track its location in real time and queuers can see it all happening. This simple application of technology removes the guesswork, eases the burden on volunteers, and lets the student teams focus on what they do best: competing and innovating.
A Purpose-Driven Culture
This project embodies the spirit of Zebra Nation. We encourage our people to act as critical thinkers and problem solvers, empowering them to use our tools to make a positive impact. For prospective talent watching, it shows that from your first day at Zebra, you have the chance to work on meaningful projects and engage with leaders across the company.
We relentlessly pursue innovation, and that pursuit extends to our communities. By supporting organizations like FIRST, we help nurture the next generation of leaders who will continue to digitize and automate frontline operations around the world. We build the foundation for intelligent operations by investing in the people who will lead them in the future.
We envision a future where operations everywhere possess full digital awareness. This project, though small in scale, provides a perfect model as it connects the frontline workers, the queuers, with the critical assets, the robots, through intelligent automation.
The solution gives them the real-time guidance necessary for a seamless, collaborative workflow. It demonstrates how our portfolio of hardware, software, and services helps customers achieve these outcomes, whether in a sports arena, a warehouse, or a hospital.
The success of our ITDP participants on this project fills me with immense pride and reinforces my optimism for a future built by bright, capable, and compassionate minds.
