Re: Are the three day builds affecting designs?
 

Ri3D is a mixed bag for me.

What is very aggravating about Ri3D is that too many things they put out are big distractions for my team. For the last 2 years we have fragmented into multiple "competing" designs because someone saw "ooh! shiny!" on a Ri3D bot. This year it didn't happen for our intake because I wound up leading the intake and we had an effective design already. We even had time to make 2 extra spares by the end of Week 3. But man did it take forever to get to a final concept on the compound launchers (which aren't clones of Ri3D anyways) due to the distraction.

If my team couldn't come up with an effective solution to a specific game element on our own, I would probably welcome Ri3D (e.g. bridge lowering in 2012). Yet these last two years the team overall has been semi-derailed by the flash the Ri3D Advertising Blitz puts out.

Maybe I shouldn't complain. We did have a 90% bot at the Week 0 scrimmage (no effective catcher at that point), and we finalized a 2-ball autonomous prior to bag. Yet who knows how much better it would have been with more focus.

Re: Are the three day builds affecting designs?
 

Exiting the idea phase is tricky to go into prototyping and going from prototyping to honing down to the final(ish) idea is challenging as well. Every year we have someone way too attached to their idea but unwilling develop it in CAD or prototyping.

I think this is a challenge no matter what. In addition to RI3D, we had a lot of concepts from 2008. We were referencing a bunch of team 1114, 16, 27, 118 and etc. We got stuck on a 1114 concept before realizing the puncher was too resource intensive for our machining.

We did limit the exposure to mostly the final video, which I think came out on tuesday? By then the bulk of our intial brainstorm is done, and most students know the rulebook.

However after that our issues transitioning to a final design is our fault. I would not blame RI3D for having a wall full of ideas and concepts. Some ideas had to die in the prototype phase, we could not invest enough resources to make El Toro work there is just not enough students and mentors to go around. Same with the boom done style launcher, quite a few people wanted it and we had to cut it because there was not enough time. Yeah, that was not a popular decision but we can't have the team split to make two poorly made launchers.

There will always be a time where too many ideas will bog down the team. We had a design spec, a time line and a priority list to hone down the clutter. there are several design we never got to try that I wished we had time for but I to put them on the chopping block and move on.

Does Robot in Three Days Promote Healthy Competition?
 

A few mentors, team members, and I were discussing this yesterday as we were watching some live streams of week one competitions. What we quickly noticed was that nearly every robot was implementing some kind of module (ball intake, ball launcher, etc.) that had already been proven to work on one of the RI3D robots.

The amount of robots waving around motorized airport ground crew directing sticks or lowering a wheely bar over top of the ball to collect it was what troubled us the most. How some teams didn't execute the designs as well as other teams is beside the point, what matters is that a ton of robots this year look, or at least operate, much in the same way. And I think RI3D is partially to blame.

I'm not saying that teams couldn't have arrived at such designs on their own. I'm saying that watching a video of a working robot three days after the start of build season, seeing what worked and what didn't, and then implementing variations of what they saw working onto their own robot was probably something that happened a lot this season.

Our team is partially guilty of this too. For about two weeks, we toyed with the idea of having a spinning wheel intake. When we found that it was going to be too heavy for our robot, we went for a lighter forklift-esque design. And so far in our practice sessions, the design has worked very well for us.

I don't think the Robot in Three Days Event really promotes healthy competition or a true creative process for teams. With how much more popular the event has become this year, thousands of teams probably saw the videos, and even if their final robot didn't use anything that they saw in the videos, it probably gave them plenty of good ideas. Ideas that should have been generated from within the team through discussion and experimentation.

At the same time, I think the event is really fun to watch, and it is interesting to see what the teams can throw together in just a few days. One of our mentors thought that they could still do the event, just not show the footage until after the end of build season. He also suggested that they could wait until the last three days of the build season, rather than starting on the first day.

But that's just what I think, and I really want to hear what some other teams have to say. What's your opinion of the RI3D thing?

Re: Does Robot in Three Days Promote Healthy Competition?
 

And in previous years, for which there is copious amounts of documentation, video, photos, etc....

Let's face it--there are only so many ways to efficiently and effectively intake a ball, and it comes down to what type of roller, scoop, or grabber you want to use.

Given how week one has been shaping up so far, I'd say that we have a long, long way to go before we start worrying that the quick-build projects are having some huge impact on the game.

Re: Are the three day builds affecting designs?
 

Creativity is overrated.

One of the things I've learned from seven years of engineering school and five summers of internships is that engineering is not about creativity. It's about making stuff that works. Don't get me wrong. Creativity is great. I love seeing clever mechanical designs no one else thought of. I enjoy watching teams push the envelope and bring harebrained ideas into the mainstream (e.g, mecanum wheels were almost unheard of in robotics until two FRC teams introduced them in 2005).

But in engineering, if something simple, something obvious, something completely tedious and boring and "been-there-done-that" gets the job done - you should probably use that. Not always. But usually.

Instead, as JVN wrote elegantly, all of us are copying other ideas. The trick is to refine, combine, and synthesize ideas to create something better. After the 3-day build was over, I remember someone commenting, "Not bad. They got the pace about right, but they stopped 6 weeks too early." As many people in this thread already said, many of the ideas are already in the minds of the experienced mentors and historically astute students - Ri3D helps put them out in the open, and jump-starts the iterative refinement free-for-all.

Second, remember that there are several scales on which this innovation and design happens. One is the robot concept. But generally, that happens during only a few days of build season. The rest of the season requires just as much innovation and design and clever thinking, but you don't see it from the stands.
As someone who's been watching FRC for quite some time, yes, this year has somewhat less visible design variance than past years. However, this has been true in past games as well - look at 2010 (Breakaway), where nearly all robots were little flat rectangles with kickers on the front. But the design variation inside the little boxes was still impressive. If you take the time to look under the hood, you'll notice a surprising amount of variation this year, too.

Finally, despite the cruched schedule, Ri3D/BB is a superb model of the FRC design process. How many teams would benefit from following the strategize/prototype/design/build/iterate process that the Ri3D teams described? We get a peek into how some really great minds think about this process. And we ought to copy that!

Re: Are the three day builds affecting designs?
 

Are they affecting designs? Absolutely. But it seems like many people are jumping to conclusions, conclusions which are overly-broad and seem to disregard the fact that FIRST is made up of a lot of different teams, each with wildly varying design processes and resources.

On as basic level, it's easy to say that these robots are influencing designs. It's probably impossible to see one of those videos and not say to yourself "wow, I wonder if I should just build that exact robot except better." Or, perhaps you say to yourself "wow, I should build that robot's collector and that other robot's shooter and that third robot's drivetrain."

But does that necessarily mean teams are "copying?" Yes and no. And this is why it's important to realize that teams have wildly varying levels of resources and experience. Obviously the following is also generalizing, and there are always exceptions, but I prefer to think of it in terms of different "tiers" of teams:

Low-Tier (low resources, low experience, mostly newer teams)
-These are the teams that are probably "copying" the Ri3D robots. But is that necessarily a bad thing? These are teams that lack the confidence and/or resources to build something "original," and, more often than not, end up with a drivetrain and little else. Being able to copy/draw inspiration from these Ri3D robots is the difference between driving around for 2.5 minutes and playing the game.

Mid-Tier (some mix of resources and experience)
-These are the teams this question is probably aimed at. Now, I'm sure some of these teams will replace an actual design process with a Ri3D clone, even if it's probably within their resources to put more effort into the design process. But not putting huge effort into the design process isn't necessarily a bad thing - if you save a week and some amount of money on early prototyping (by skipping part or most of that phase of the design process by copying a Ri3D robot) you now get to spend that extra week and money refining a design that you know works. And the end result is certainly a different experience, but it's equally (possibly more) valuable and is virtually guaranteed to produce a higher-quality robot.

Top-tier (lots of experience, lots of resources)
-These are teams that are going all-out on their design process no matter what happens. If they arrive at the same design that one of the Ri3D robots did, so be it. At the very least it'll be a much higher-quality finish (given, you know, an extra 6+ weeks of R&D).


At the end of the day, there are two ways to categorize the possible effects: "inspiration" (you know, the whole point of FIRST - what are students getting out of this) and "competition"

Inspiration: students are getting exposed to more designs earlier in the design process. In the case of the low-tier teams they are getting incredibly valuable experience, and in the case of the high-tier teams it doesn't matter. In the case of some mid-tier teams you may see that these Ri3D robots reduce the students' exposure to the early (brainstorming, early prototyping) design process, but it's made up for by increased exposure to iterative design. And, of course, it has limited effect on the top-tier teams.

Competition: Top-tier is unaffected as always. Some mid-tier teams are unaffected, some mid-tier teams end up with a higher-quality robot. Low-tier teams have clones but I'd rather have 4 clones on the field than 2 clones and 2 robots that do nothing but drive around.


tldr: The benefits aren't enormous, but they're there. And I really can't find a compelling downside. It makes FIRST more competitive and, at worst, shifts the learning experience of FIRST towards iterative design.