The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jsYs...ature=youtu.be

Robot in 3 Days is back and we’re bigger and better than ever for 2014! With more of the action, more of the excitement and more of the action! This year, 3 teams will compete to build a robot to play the 2014 FIRST Robotics Competition game in just 72 hours.

The teams are:



From the Midwest, Team AndyMark will be lead by Andy Baker and Mark Koors of AndyMark Inc. From the Northeast, Team Boom Done will be captained by Joe Johnson of legendary team Chief Delphi 47, leading a team of talented engineers. From the Southeast, Team Ri3d 1.0 will be captained by none other than Cute Baby.

But this aint no kiddy stuff.. The teams will be competing for the “Cute Baby Cup” (name pending) to see who built the best robot. Team’s will be judged on 3 categories:

Viral Outreach: The number of video views, tweets and followers they attract.
Viewer Votes: Vote for your favorite, for whatever reason you want. Best robot, most effective use of a falafel, or bribery… Literally anything goes.
Judged Panel: A panel of professional judges ( to be named later ) will review the designs and decide on their choice as winner.

We'll post more updates here and on Robotin3Days.Com and as we near the competition if you want to stay up to speed follow us on Twitter or Facebook @Robotin3Days or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

YESSSSSSSS! :D

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

5 robots built by 5 of the top mentors in FIRST in 3 days...someone needs to do a sixth



Now that I'm in Mass now, I think I'm gonna have to declare allegiance to Team Boom.Done

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

So we just going to make build season 3 days now? This is the very exciting news. I need to buy at least 3 more monitors to have one for each of the live 72 hour builds.

Thanks for starting this and making it even better, keep up the great work.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

This is the very best possible news. Following this will come in second only to actually building with my team this year. Thank you all so, so much!

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

This is so awesome!! Tough decision to choose between Team AndyMark and Team Ri3D

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Love it. Love it so much.

Won't the AM people have an advantage cause they know the game a little early?

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

This is going to be insane. I'm so freaking psyched about this upcoming season.

Due to the location, I'm gonna have to toss in my support for Dr. Joe's team!

Holy crap I am excited!

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Andy and Mark aren't the only two employees; I'm sure that game pieces are stocked at their warehouse, but it's not out of the question that they could have all that handled by other employees.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

This poor kid is gonna wake up in like 10 years and wonder why there is a trophy named after her.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Then we can have a bunch of 3-day robot matches. Seriously, this needs to happen.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

This is five groups of the smartest minds in FRC, testing out a wide variety of ideas for simple and effective robots. It doesn't get better than this. 2014 is going to be one of the most competitive years ever.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Now it's all up to someone come up with 4 robots in 3 days..... Or maybe VEXpro decides to throw in another team or two to avoid being upstaged :-)

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Week -6 tournaments? Do I have my math right?

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Perhaps they'll trust Karthik with a power drill after all? ;)

I was watching some of ESPN's bowl coverage, and they talked about how YouTube videos on coaching quarterbacks has made the level of play at that position better on the high school level, and thus now the college level. I have to think that RI3D and now the Build Blitz are game changers for FRC to the same extent, creating a massive pool of prototyping resources for teams. (What one team can actually run through five full prototypes for how to play a game in that time span?)

It's gonna be an interesting season, that's for sure!

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

This is amazing. Cannot wait.

Is it possible to coordinate between the teams to have them create different strategic designs? As in (per 2013) having one team make a cycler, one with ground feeding and one for full court shooting? Not sure how well that'd go for overly hard tasks (full court shooting), but slightly different ways to play the game would be very helpful for other teams.

Also, how big are the teams making these robots? Is it small like the first year, or bigger (ie. 10+ people)?

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

It nothing else how about those five robots and the top FRC 25 robot compete in a match during IRI this summer, assuming that logistics could be worked out. It was kind of sad that Ri3D last year built a very solid robot, but it was never able to be in a match. I think I will be pulling for Ri3D 1.0 because they provided the initial spark that lit the fire for this idea. I hope that all five robots this year will provided students and teams with a high amount of inspiration.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Can we get a list of names of team members? It'd be cool to know more about each one.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Andy Baker- Nuff said :)

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Andy Baker once built a championship robot in 72 minutes by staring at a kit of parts and willing it to win.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Chief Delphi folk,
I am SO psyched to be involved in this thing.

BOOM DONE. is going to build a great robot. By many measures, I have a stronger team of robot engineers and access to better equipment and resources than I have ever had (and that includes the early days of Chief Delphi, which is saying something!).

BUT... 3 Days imposes its own harsh limits. So certain things are impossible just by the clock on the wall. Beyond this, BOOM DONE. is imposing limits on itself that I think will be unique among the 5 teams currently planning on building a robot by Noon on Tuesday (consider this something akin to Dan's Our House, Our Rules speech)

BOOM DONE. will:

• Build a robot that could pass a FIRST inspection
• Build a robot that could be built by a 30th Percentile FIRST team
• Build a robot that would likely be playing after lunch on Saturday

Pass inspection:
Of course, if FIRST requires something on our robot that we can't get by noon on Tuesday, we are going to have to amend this list, but as a rough idea, we'll have bumpers. we'll have a cRIO, we'll meet the wiring specs, and motor specs, and BOM limits. In short, we will have slog through the same crazy quilt patchwork of 10,000 rules that FIRST teams have to slog through.

30th Percentile:
All the members of our team are iRobot folk. We will be working at the iRobot HQ. The team was almost CALLED Team iRobot (until some folks got cold feet at the last moment). If we wanted to, we could almost design a robot in CAD, start with a block of aluminum, mount it in one of our mills and machine away everything but our robot by noon on Tuesday. But we are not going to do that. Our team has spent a LOT of time and energy trying to figure out ways to build robots that low resourced teams could duplicate.

We'll talk more about what that means, but bottom line, we want to raise the bar for the bottom third of the FIRST teams. If we can do this in 72 hours, you can do it in 6 weeks.

Playing After Lunch:
I co-founded Chief Delphi. I was there at Disney when Dr. Murphy handed Woodie the FIRST Woodie Flowers Award. I GET that FIRST is about more than winning on the field. BUT... ...it is my experience that the great programs of the FIRST world almost always build on a foundation of competitive robots. Success on the field begets success in other realms.

So... ...for a lot of teams, a successful year boils down to playing after lunch on Saturday. I want to give teams a road map: Here is a path that will likely lead to playing after lunch.

There is a lot more to say, but that'll do it for now.

Let's do this thing.

Joe J.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Thanks, Joe. This is a good question.

The AndyMark people on the design team for our robot in three days effort do not know the 2014 FRC game. We do have a head start in knowing about the Kit of Parts drive chassis (aka. AM14U), and parts in FIRST Choice.

Therefore, our team will be using the AM14U chassis and also as many Kit of Parts items as we can to create mechanisms and robot assemblies.

I'm pumped about this effort and excited to be working with a group of excellent designers and fabricators to help make AndyMark create a competitive robot within 3 days. However, I am bummed about not being able to watch the other teams as they build their contraptions. Maybe we can taunt them along their way and have some fun with this!

Andy B.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

To make things more realistic for the average FRC team, what kind of resources will each of the teams be using?

IR3 Creative had resources that I think most teams have (mill, lathe, other manual equipment) + COTS. Will AndyMark focus on all Kit and other COTS parts + Manual machines only? Same question for Boom Done.

Additionally, will the teams be working towards creating 3 differing design concepts, or will there be no coordination between them to vary the end result?

.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

ooooh! Any chance you'd be cool with some of us Dr Joe fanboys coming by during this event? I promise to try to keep my "oh my gosh oh my gosh I can't believe it's Dr Joe" quiet in the corner...

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Looks great, folks! I can't wait to see where this goes...I'm especially interested in seeing the variation in strategy, design, and mechanism choice by the various groups. :D

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

We'll have to play it by ear. Let's see how it goes once the 72 hour clock starts.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

For teams AndyMark and BOOM DONE. will there be separate youtube channels and twitter accounts for updates on those teams or will it all be posted on the current RI3D channel?

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Right now Robotin3Days.Com and YouTube Robotin3Days will act as an aggregate for all major content releases. The plan is to also mirror the live streams on our site. There are some technical bits to work out there.

AndyMark will be tweeting (@andymarkinc) updates and simulcasting videos on their AndyMark Inc YouTube channel. I believe they also have some cool additional content going up so it's definitely worth a subscribe.

TeamBoomDone will be tweeting out @TeamBoomDone and currently will be uploading video content to Robotin3Days YouTube channel.

Re: The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!
 

Right now Robotin3Days.Com, YouTube Robotin3Days and Twitter @Robotin3Days will act as an aggregate for all major content releases. The plan is to also mirror the live streams on our site. There are some technical bits to work out there.

AndyMark will be tweeting (@andymarkinc) updates and simulcasting videos on their AndyMark Inc YouTube channel. I believe they also have some cool additional content going up so it's definitely worth a subscribe.

TeamBoomDone will be tweeting out @TeamBoomDone and currently will be uploading video content to Robotin3Days YouTube channel.