Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

At the beginning of the season when multiple "3 day robots" (Ri3D, BuildBlitz) were announced, there was a lot of discussion on whether or not it was a good thing or not to have these televised, "professionally built" FRC robots.

Here is one of the many threads: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=123152

I setup a reminder to follow up and now I want to see what you all think. I am not sure I have finished making up my mind, but here are my initial thoughts.

The biggest thing I wonder is what designs we would have seen without the 3 day robots? Would teams have come to similar conclusions in 6 weeks that the 3 day robot teams did in 72 hours? Would we have seen different ideas at the competitions if there were no 3 day robots?

I admit it was a little disappointing to see some bots that looked identical to what I saw on day 3 of the build season on YouTube at the competitions. Listening to my scouting team describe teams was often similarly disappointing. Some things I heard were: "it's a SimBot with a JVN intake" and "it's literally a Boom Done clone".

I never was able to investigate these teams in more detail in the pits. Maybe they were a small team with limited financial resources and this was their first solid bot that could play the game well. Perhaps they were rookies with limited professional engineering mentors and would have struggled to do more than driving. Maybe this was the first year a team was able to have a robot done by week 4 and actually spent time testing or doing driver practice.

Many teams made clever combinations of the 3 day robot designs, combining their strengths and improving on their weaknesses.

Overall I thought the 3 day robots added to the season and would like to see them come back. I think that releasing all the code and CAD after the 72 hours was a good thing because it gave teams a working example to look at.

My main dislike was that the Boom Done team kept working on their bot and releasing updates during the season (I do not think any others kept working, but I could be wrong). While it was interesting to see their progress, I think that limiting the FRC professionals to a short amount of time helps showcase good concepts, while not figuring out all the fine details of a design for the students. The amount of work these FRC veterans can crank out in 72 hours is amazing and a huge help to many teams.

The opinions above are my own and are offered in the spirit of healthy reflection and debate. It is not my intent to diminish anyone's design or critique how their team operates.

-matto-

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I am a strong supporter of the Ri3D/ BuildBlitz robots for many perspectives.

1. They are a good example of what a mid level robot must/ will be capable of at regionals.
2. They provide a multitude of solid, tested, and documented mechanisms available from the start. This helps out teams who do not have the time, resources, or wish to prototype every type of mechanism capable of completing a task.
3. It allows teams strategy department to get working immediately knowing how the game will be played and what basic principals will or wont work.
4. For rookie teams, what better way to get an introduction to FIRST that seeing robots preforming this years game in a matter of hours.
5. The Ri3D builds can be an emergency backup in the event a team finds out late in the season there mechanism does not work.
6. By having 5 builds the chances of your alliance having a toaster/ printer/ box on wheels robot goes down significantly.
7. By showing off low cost, easy access machinable parts (versa system) less machining capable teams will have a solid place to start on construction materials and techniques that actually apply to them.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I think it's a good thing, as others have said, it provides options for teams unable to design their own functioning mechanisms due to delays, and helps those who would otherwise be competing with box-bots. This increases the competitiveness of the competition, which helps everyone.

The downside is that it decreases creativity, with many designs from teams capable of designing and constructing unique components simply being copies of the Ri3d stuff.

Our team was able to counter this effect by asking the students to avoid watching Ri3d until initial brainstorming, strategizing and conceptual design had been completed.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I liked the Choo-choo mechanism. Unless teams like us were looking at (EDIT: I knew better) Winnovation 2008 robot (or people who worked on it ahem Aren), I doubt that many teams would have stumbled across this great mechanism.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

It's very cool, no doubt, but if you have access to the other side of the pivot, I think a snail cam is a better equivalent. Much easier to build strong without so many cantilevered shafts.

Back on topic - I'm a supporter of RI3D and Build Blitz. Sure we've seen a few hundred JVN low pivot winched catapults, O-Ryon claws with kickers, and BoomDone/Copioli motorized high pivot catapults this year. But I'd rather see what teams can do with that inspiration than a bunch of schools flounder looking for an idea. (Much of the similarity is probably due to design convergence, rather than imitation anyway)

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

The jury is still out for me.

After attending a week zero event and then having watched countless hours of video via TBA, followed by our lone regional at North Star I keep seeing robots that were near mimics of the Ri3D Bots. After all of this, I am left wondering if we would have seen more differentiation of designs in the robots themselves without Ri3D.

I give all credit to my design team that was lead by Ginger Power by creating a Robot that was very different in design and game play in reference to the Ri3D Robots. Our robot had a very unique design structure that included a ground floor pick-up via a fork design (which we did not utilize at North Star). Our throwing mechanism - a catapult with a very unique cam that was powered by a winch that my students built and stressed with speargun tubing http://www.magisto.com/album/video/f...8wNSIHDmEwCXl9

What you do not see in this video is how the lead screw has put tension on the tubing and then the student-built winch pulls it back into position. But if you watch our videos from North Star, you can see how effective it can be - and during this event we were only pulling back at around 40% - if we pushed it the full 100%, we would be throwing outside of the HP area with ease. We never pushed the limit as we saw no need to. Especially when we were drafted by the #1 alliance to keep doing what we were already capable of.

We struggled early in our Regional as we were not able to fit the Superstructure to the competition robot - but once we did, we were dominant.

I see the positives of Ri3D, but I also see how it can severely limit the ingenuity of students - especially if the teams are heavily influenced by the Ri3D designs, or by the mentors that are swayed by Ri3D.

I know that I may be a little out on the fringes as I allow my students to make the decisions of the final design (but we have been fairly sucessful the last two seasons) - but as a coach and a teacher, I realize the valuation in failure. And in the last two seasons, 4607 has failed a lot in the initial design phases of our robot (any inspector at North Star in 2013 can attest to this as we were the last robot to pass inspections - where we had to rebuild our robot on the spot).

But I believe in my students, I encourage them to fail in their endeavors to find the best formula. There is valuation in failure. That is why you will never see me with the drive team. I feel that my coaching has already been done before the regional - I have no need to be on the drive team - just like I have no need to be on the field when my soccer players are playing the game.

Aside from all of that hyperbole, I do see value in modeling. If a team can gain insight from Ri3D and then improve, more power to them. The competition of ideas and ideals is why FRC has quickly become my favorite of all sports - no matter of the controversies.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Me too. I can't vote on a poll that appears to be a false dichotomy. How about you add a selection for me?

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I suppose my opinion has been fully formed now that my team's season's over. I've been to two competitions, watched many others, and must have seen hundreds of robots by now. A lot of robots look similar to each other, and a lot of teams have "clones" of Ri3D and build blitz robots, but all of these teams went through a journey to build their robots, and I'm sure that along the way these teams had to iterate their designs. I don't think it's possible to put together a Ri3D/BB "clone" without learning something or having to iterate a part of the design to match your resources.

Not all robots that look like the 3 day projects copied them. Plenty of high performing teams look similar to the 3 day projects, but most likely they prototyped many different mechanisms and through iteration developed their current robot. This may have been the most successful year my team has had, and also one of the most complicated robots we've ever built, but if you strip away the catcher walls, it looks like an 8020 and versaframe version of a team JVN build. (For Reference). I met with an old mentor of mine, and I showed him our robot. His first response was "You guys copied the robot in 3 days, didn't you?". I explained that while our intake and catapult look very similar, the amount of prototyping, designing, and engineering that went into those systems took more than 3 days. I was actually inspired by 2012 over-the-bumper intakes when I first sketched up what would end up becoming the intake on our robot. We did use the "choo choo" mechanism that Aren Hill came up with, but we must have gone through at least 7 iterations of the darned thing before we finally developed one that worked with our system.

I think these 3 day builds have done a great job in helping teams get started and have certainly reduced the number of robots incapable of manipulating the game pieces. Not every robot can manipulate game pieces well, but that's solved by iterating and improving designs, which falls onto teams. It's not necessarily a bad thing that robots look alike. Sure, there's a creativity award, but I think every team wants to field a robot that works, and when there are 6 different concepts that are already presented, it's much easier to do that than starting from scratch.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Another point to keep in mind - teams do not have to look at the Ri3D videos and information. It can and should be a team decision to figure out what references and sources they use for ideation and robot design. Ri3D robots are just another source teams can use or ignore.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Honestly, I think the 3i3d has little effect on the design on more established teams. There are only so many "obvious" designs out there; look at 2012, a lot of robots looked the same and so did in previous years. I think the only thing 3i3d did for the more established teams was verifying concepts

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I think overall they add value to the program.

While it may lessen the creativity for some, it seems to bring up the floor for a greater number. Even with the designs there were many "box on wheels". It is still not easy to recreate for many teams.

I believe more students are inspired by a better competition with the floor being raised, as opposed to the less students inspired with the lowered creativity.

It appears to me to be a net overall win for the program.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I think our team took too much inspiration from Ri3D. Next year I think we're going to try and sit down and work out the decision matrix weightings before we look at what other teams are doing. There's nothing wrong with seeing how something is successfully implemented and getting inspiration from it, but there's something to be said for having the students design something on their own.

Ultimately it's another resource, no worse than CD or looking at youtube videos of previous years. There's only so many ways you can handle a giant inflatable ball, just like last year there were only so many ways you could throw a frisbee.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

But they do, so many teams do, and we saw so many duplicates this year. I like the additions that Ri3d/Build Blitz can add, but why not do them in week 2 or 3? Still give plenty of time to borrow ideas, but also gives teams a chance to solve their own problem first. Lots of my students saw the solutions developed by the 3 day teams and those were the only possible solutions they saw all season. It effectively removed a few of our students from the unique and creative design of our robot. High School teenage tunnel vision is a powerful thing...

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

In this case, it might be the responsibility of us mentors to make sure our students aren't as affected by Ri3D. A lot of teams that copy Ri3D and build blitz can't get it working very well in the full 6 weeks. I'm not sure if having them release a good 2-3 weeks into the season will help at all. It will probably hurt most teams who will immediately switch design, wasting the time before Ri3D and Build Blitz reveal.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Here's a fun story, I've been around a while and I knew about the 1625 choo choo from when it was done in 2008. However, I had a student, who watched Team JVN, explain it to me ... this was the first time I understood how it worked. So, inspiration managed.


As an addendum - 1114 did not use that linkage in 2008. They used a dog released winch.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I think this season taught us that by and large, the Ri3D robots could play the game, but were not optimal designs. I think that's wonderful both in terms of raising the floor and in terms of inspiring better design.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I posted this on the Reddit Thread regarding this earlier this week but I figured I should post it here as well.

Build Marathons such as Robot in 3 Days or Buildblitz are raising the bar, not lowering the floor.

See it as you wish, but this is how I feel about the individual programs on their own.

- Andrew

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

at first i thought Ri3D and build blitz were going to lead us towards the vex mentality of "the six bar is the best robot and we'll copy because we simply cant beat it" but i'm starting to come around and here's why:

1. They allow teams with very limited technical skill a chance to be competitive. i knew a good team that went with a boom done design because all the advanced mechanical team members left.

2. They are not the best designs available. There simply a start, unlike in vex with the NZ designs, you can design a better robot.

3. Most teams that choose them will not end up in the top 20%. (have you seen one dominate a competition yet?)

4. In the words of our drive coach " I love the Ri3d designs, without knowing anything about the team, i know the robots shooting sweet spot and how good the intake is." there's a strategic advantage you give up by copying. Teams have to normally scout to determine how to beat you where if you have a Ri3D design its pretty easy

just some food for thought.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I feel this is the most important aspect of robot in 3 days: it allows rookie teams and veterans alike to get an idea about what to build, allowing rookies to focus on learning how to build a solid robot that will play the game, and veteran teams to use ideas from the robots as a bases to improve on. More robots in three days will give an even greater amount of ideas to FRC teams, allowing the skill floor and ceiling to rise for all teams in FRC.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

On your third point it depends on what you mean by choose them. There are a lot of robots who's base was a 72 hour build but they improved and iterated on top of them. I would say 359 is a pretty clear example of this. Their robot base is very similar to the team O-Ryon robot but they made it drastically better. Our team did the same thing, there is very little, almost nothing now, on our robot that is the same from the Boom Done Robot but that was our starting point.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

As a New York team my personal experience with RI3D is a little different than what I saw watching other regionals and attending the Buckeye. Quite simply. I don't really like it. A team can build a JVN bot without changing anything and still seed first or at least easily within the top eight. At other regionals you see the higher end of the spectrum being innovative or at least interesting bots. New York has only a handful of particularly strong teams and RI3D helps keep New York teams making competitive bots. At the same time I don't really like how it basically tells most of the teams that you can win just by copying someone else. Some things like the JVN intake are things that most teams would've figured out but el torro and the choo choo are things that most teams wouldn't have done themselves.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I help mentor a rookie team that is located 80 miles away from my house. I got involved with the team 3 weeks into the build season. At that point in the season, the drive base was put together and running. And a catapult was built that would throw a ball IF you placed the ball on it and you physically pulled it down against the springs. They had purchased a winch in hopes of finding a way to energize the catapult. As luck would have it we found the JVN video which gave us direction. And yes we copied it.http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/40317 High school students got to see cad drawings for the first time, experiance a neet mechanical device in the Chu- Chu, work with and begin to understand a pneumatic system and compete not just participate.:) If not for JVN:cool: we would have had a drive base and a few poles to play defense with. The team has advances 2-3 years over where it would have been without the 3 day build. No brainer!

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Building off of this, my team (2046) started off as a RI3D clone, except we shot out of the other end. but what teams didn't always see was our 6 CIM drive, and the efficiency as to which the robot was made. not to mention that we switched to a new collector that collected better, then to a higher angle catapult, and continued to improve. What was nice about the Robot in 3 days videos was that they created a base standard that allowed a team that had never had their robot ready for their first competition of the season be ready for the first competition (and in fact win it), while figuring out how to further improve our robot to continue to be one of the best in the Pacific Northwest (if that's not conceited of me to say; I mean, I am a little biased)

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

One of the favorite memories of this season for me was seeing a local team that had only made eliminations twice win the North Star regional this year, with a robot that was heavily inspired by Boom Done's.

Seeing them actually contributing and competing was awesome.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

This. I was really disappointed by the lack of iteration upon the Ri3d designs by teams in Michigan. Many just copied or made very little changes to the design, instead of iterating upon the 3 day builds. I like the 3 day challenge, i just think teams are missing the bigger opportunities available.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I'm surprised Aren hasn't jumped in yet. He proudly tells that the "choo-choo" mechanism was one he discovered when he was in middle school.

The three day robot idea is interesting to me. On one hand I really appreciated seeing some of strategic/black box concepts/ideas/wotnot (such as calculating the "sweet-spot", neutrino made use of that idea and using it to determine ranges). I'm sure many teams benefited from the robot designs as well.

On the other hand it turned me off to watch adults play a "kid's" game. Its not really inspiring to watch an MLB player hit a home run on a little league field.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

This is just ridiculous, to call FRC a "kid's" game is extremely disrespectful. We do this for the students but the reason so many of the great mentors we have in FRC do it is because it's not a "kids" game. It's an extremely hard engineering challenge that we give to students. The challenge keeps a whole lot of very bright people coming back year after year to work right along side students to find a good solution and very rarely do any of them find the "correct" solution. If it were easy a whole lot of people wouldn't come back every year.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I'm not going to rate our own team, other than we give it our best at every event we attend.
As Allen stated, we took the ORyon idea and worked from there.
We absolutely love our robot, its performance this season, and in hindsight, with no regrets after winning 3 events.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I don't personally see the problem with Ri3D. It's like every other thing in FIRST: if it works for your team, use it. Just because you would rather not make a clone of robot in 3 days, that might not be in the best interest for another team. Does varying levels of mentor involvement have an impact on teams? Sure, but that doesn't make it wrong. Ri3D is no different, IMO

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

It is a competition aimed at high school students. The challenges are hard, but they should not be mind boggling for a seasoned engineer with experience in the sport. There is no "correct" solution for basketball... but there is a difference between the pros and the high school leagues.

Additionally, the word kids is in quotation marks for a reason. I don't honestly mean its a game for children.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

How is this different from how some teams function normally? Almost all the perineal powerhouses (as well as some teams that don't always do so well) are driven by dedicated, seasoned engineers with experience in the sport. They do so well because the challenges are easier for professional engineers who have been in FRC for years than for inexperienced high school kids who graduate every four years.

Personally, I'd rather have those professional engineers share their experience with everyone than keep it to their own teams. But pick your poison, I guess.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Last post and I'm out.

I'm maintaining my analogy:

An NBA star coaching a basketball team is wonderful and fantastic. I love that there are awesome mentors out there helping students and working with teams.

Mentors playing robots with students is great, fantastic, and I love it. I like seeing mentors being awesome with students. I've worked with teams that have seen the whole spectrum of mentor involvement and have no qualms.

I think robots in three days is weird because it cuts out the students and becomes, like I've said, watching an professional athlete play in high school sports.

Mentors playing robots in a high school competition (without students) is weird to me, and I find it off-putting. I'm not trying to imply anything further than the situation of the Ri3D.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

At a minimum, it was really interesting to see what the teams could come up with in three days. I'd probably agree that it feels a little odd for the "pros" to take over the game for a few days without any students. Still, it's only three days of work, so even really brilliant people aren't going to come up with a world champion caliber robot that fast. It's more of a baseline that other teams can start from.

Our team certainly benefited from those designs, using a bunch of ideas from the Ri3D and Build Blitz teams. I don't feel too bad about that, because creating a completely original idea is tough in a competition where so many solutions to similar problems have already been created in the past. Our team had a lot of fun and learned a lot from testing and refining the ideas we used. I think engineering is more tweaking and iterating and refining than outright invention. We made a roller collector, a catapult, and a winch with a ratchet wrench + pneumatic release. All of those were different than the originals in some pretty significant ways, and there was plenty of sweat and TLC put into those modified designs.

I wonder what we would have built without Ri3D? I suspect that we would have looked more closely at a Simbot SS design. We would have been researching previous designs in any case.

I'm particularly glad that roller collectors came out in the 3 day robots. That was a really doable mechanism that any team can pull off, and the more robots that can collect a ball, the better. The 3 day teams didn't invent the first ever roller collectors for FRC, but they showed everybody that they are effective for this game.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I am still not a fan of the 3 day builds. Our team did watch the videos, but not until the Thursday after kickoff, after we made decisions on what direction we wanted to go. We did it as a team and discussed how these robots would work with our design. I guess if a team does not have the creative design resources, then they are a good thing. It seems like so many teams got stuck in the design influence of the 3 day builds.
I think if they are going to continue with this, the teams doing the three day build should be required to do it with a kit chassis, that way they are truly helping teams that do not have the creative design resources.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

This is not a top-down activity, where anyone has the authority to dictate to anyone what they can or can't do. Nobody has any ability to tell a non-FRC team group of people what to do or how to do it, so there's no such thing as "requiring" any of these groups to do anything.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Only one, Boom Done, of the 6 72 hour builds used a completely custom chassis and they did it show that it was possible in such a short time. All the other chassis were basically COTS. Part of the reason for the 72 hours builds is promote products which isn't a bad thing. A more diverse understanding and use of COTS parts helps teams build better robots.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I absolutely love BB/Ri3d, we used some of their ideas very effectively on my team. The only thing that I have against the Ri3D/BB is that certain individuals seem to think that anyone that builds anything worse than one of those robots has "failed". I will touch on a few reasons why this is ridiculous:

time-These guys build their robots in 72 hours, and from what I saw, most of them literally worked for all 72 hours. Making an estimate of my team's total hours: 15hrs/week*6weeks - 10 hours in early build season + 10 hours in late build season = 90 hours, with a good chunk of that time going into set-up/take-down. Since we only have maybe 5 students working at any given time, our total man-hours will fall well short of what the 3-day builds do.

experience-Some individuals working on these robots have more years of FRC experience than all of the mentors and students on my team have, put together. Even a few years out, when we have more experienced students, they will start to leave. The groups building these robots will always have more combined experience than the average team out there.

resources- Most teams have to work on a budget, and have to use some of that precious build time waiting for parts to arrive. Also, making quick changes (different motor, different gearing, etc...) for them is easy, but quick changes like this are impossible for many teams.

Again, I love these 3 day build robots, but I don't enjoy people looking down on us when our robot is worse than one of them.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

For 955, Ri3D is used to validate concepts that have gone to prototyping. Our inital design phase is completed in 3 days, so we are usually independent of Ri3D. We really liked Ri3D, because it presented weaknesses with packaging and also early validation data. As an example, our team chose to package our catapult and intake on opposite ends of the robot to eliminate the rock that Team 1.0 had. Initally, we didn't follow BuildBlitz at all, but we found the cam gear through that channel which is a brilliant mechanism to use with our catapult.

Overall, Ri3D provides good validation data and helps show early problems with specific designs, saving us time and money.

I do have a gripe with Buildblitz though, both robots on there could win regionals without any additional iterations. They are refined bots, and I think they possesed qualities that the Ri3D teams lacked, and qualities that many teams lack, which is polish. The Buildblitz robots are pressed out, they can do everything well and if a team possesses the knowhow or the money, they could re-manufacture the robot with ease. My point here is that the Buildblitz robots are too refined, and they could have too much influence on the sport.

Obviously recreating these robots is another challenge

Sorry if I rambled a bit, it's late :D

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I haven't been involved with FRC very long, but I see plenty of design variation this year (maybe even more than last year, at the top level especially).

I think something worth mentioning is that there are certain mechanisms and certain teams that are copied more than others. I've seen far more JVN and Boom Done style builds than say, Team Copioli copies. To me, that suggests that Ri3D serves as a kind of prototyping for many teams - they are exposed to a variety of mechanisms and can determine for themselves what type of mechanisms will suit their strategy the best. I think this is very helpful to teams that do not have the resources to prototype a variety of mechanisms for themselves.

Our team's robot looks very little like any of the 3-day robots, but we were inspired to use a choo-choo gear to wind our shooter from Team JVN. I think that presenting a variety of working robots to view before the build season gives teams a base to build from, without ruining the game. All of the Ri3D robots are competitive but not dominant designs so teams still need to push them further to be winning - especially if other teams have 3-day style robots to build from as well.

Overall, I think the 3-day robots raise the achievable bar for struggling teams, which is always a good thing - this year especially.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

So there's a few things here with Ri3D: lots of pros, lots of cons. I think Evan here has nailed a handful of the pros - it helps struggling teams, it helps rookies, and it gives ideas for mechanisms not whole machines. And this is why one half of me likes it. The reason the other half doesn't like it - it limits thinking and innovation, a common theme we are seeing not just here in FIRST, but in our society as a whole.

Just my 2 cents.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

It's sad to see how the well intended philosophy of mentors guiding/sharing experience with students is sliding down hill. Not going to turn this into ugly thread of who/what is right or wrong, I am just moving out FLL!

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I still have yet to see any hard evidence that "thinking" or "innovation" were any lower this year than in previous years. I'd really appreciate the next person to bring up this assertion providing non-anecdotal evidence.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I completely agree, most great ideas come from combining other ideas. That requires first that you gain a ton of experience with other ideas. The 72 hour builds do a great job of exposing students to a large set of ideas that they can build on.

Even the teams that build robots that are very similar (I don't know of any team that exactly copied a robot) to the 72 hour robots they still had a to learn a lot of the details of the design and I'm sure they will be better at designing robots next year. The problems they faced this build season were just as real as other teams and they had to learn to solve them. No one expects the next great innovation in the auto industry to be designed by someone that has never seen a car before why do we expect the same from our students. Take what other people have done, learn from it, and make it better.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I personally am a fan of the 3 day robot builds. I think over the last 2 seasons in which they have been taking place, I have seen the floor of the competition increase significantly. (I also think that the availability of high quality COTS parts specifically designed for use with FIRST robots from the likes of VEX and AndyMark, among others is also a large reason)

I have mentored FRC teams for a total of 8 years (2005-2008 & 2011-2014). Several other of the engineering mentors on our current team have also been involved for similar periods of time. This gives us a large experience base of designs of both robots and mechanisms that have both worked and failed in past years. Over the past several years we have had games that have closely mirrored other games in the not too distant past (see: 2006 & 2012, 2007 & 2011, 2008 & 2014). Because we had mentors that knew the games in the past, we could easily say to our students, "Hey, this game is pretty close to 2008, lets take a look at some robots that played that game well for inspiration"

The robot in 3 days concept gives this same advantage to all teams. Not every team can have a mentor that even would have known about the game in 2008 this year. Luckily, now we have the resource of the 3 day robots to help teams which do not have the luxury of mentors that have been involved in the program for nearly a decade. The team that I was first involved with, 677, was mentored entirely by college students from Ohio State. So not only were we turning over our students every 4 years, we were also turning over all of our mentors as well. These type of projects would have helped both our students and our young mentors get up to speed a little quicker, had they been available at the time.

We all draw inspiration from somewhere. I don't see how drawing inspiration from a 3-day robot is any different than drawing inspiration from 1114's 2008 robot, or seeing roller claw mechanisms in 2007 and incorporating them in 2011. Yes, you can argue that the 3-day robots are specifically designed for this game, but as others have said, nothing is a direct copy. Even if a design were to be a direct copy, there is still likely to be a lot of testing and troubleshooting of the systems involved to get them to be as effective as possible.

I don't tend to get too preachy, but in the end its about inspiration. Some are inspired by the 3-day robots to say, "Hey, that doesn't look too hard, we could do that". Others say, "Yeah, that's a nice design, but I think it would be better with X, Y, and Z changes. Still others will challenge themselves to say "I don't want to copy the 3-day robots, I want to try something completely different". Personally, I think teams can learn from any of these ways of thinking.

Anyway, I've rambled for far too long now.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Personally, I agree with you--I'm a huge fan of Ri3D. But what non-anecdotal evidence could possibly be offered for either case? It's not like we're taking a census here. Would you be looking for something in particular?

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I'm just looking for larger scale or aggregate data-- ideally in a statistically valid form. I don't really expect anyone (either for or against Ri3D/BB) to bring in data, but I think that's the only way to move beyond rhetoric (where the conversation is now).

As for metrics, there are a couple of higher level ways (that don't require new data) to look at-- all of which have their own problems-- rookie retention/overall retention versus prior years (problem: is affected by other factors like quality of game and uncontrollable factors), lower quartile scoring ability (doesn't necessarily mention inspiration or thinking, just competitiveness).

I'd be curious if anyone has an idea of how to analyze the problem while moving away from rhetoric and into more objective analysis (which I realize is difficult and unlikely to actually happen).

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Overall I would say it is a positive engineering source of information, but I think they shouldn't release all of their info within the first week of build when everyone should be brainstorming. That takes SO much away from the actual design aspect giving the easy out of "hey this works so lets do this" instead of trying to come up with something. A little research on past year robots with similar games would provide some similar amount of info, but at least they would need to work at it.

One of the other mentors on our team actually thinks they Ri3D robots should be used by FIRST to actually play test the game to work out the kinks in the system, would be much smoother early week competitionss if this was so.

In hind sight, I think having this resource was nice, but I think it shouldn't be made available until the end of week 2 of the build season. My 2 cents anyway.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

The big issue is isolating the variables.

We could pull retention data but that would be tainted by various grants coming and going last year as well as changes in focus. And it's impossible to say with any real certainty if a team would have continued without success. (or define success for that matter)

We could pull times the game objective was achieved and compare that to similar years. 2012 work pretty well from a quick glance but has some serious problems at a deeper one. Perhaps 2006 is a good data point? Too old? Idk

Or maybe we could divide teams into historical tiers and see if they've had a pair of better years the last two compared to their traditional performance. But then how do we factor in that event performance IS a zero sum game, someone has to lose for you to win after all...

Sorry bro, don't think I can give you the data you want. Don't think anyone can. Objectively measuring the impact of Ri3D and its ilk is simply not possible. Subjectively we all have to determine if we should encourage our students to investigate these challenges. But I think that'll be a student by student question for me. Why do we have to have a definitive answer anyway?

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Like I said, I didn't really expect it to happen. The search shall continue.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

I came into the competition season expecting to see a bunch ofBB/Ri3D clones, and so many so that it would make me dislike it. That there would be 4 designs, and teams would just pick and choose.

Instead I saw a few teams who did follow one of the paths, but they can't have done it without having gained some technical knowledge along their way and/or putting their own twist on the base of the design, whether it be a catcher, new drivetrain experiment, different power system for a catapult, or other function. And all this while, teams still found unique designs (i.e 118, 254, 1678, etc.) and still stand out.

I would like to see them return next year.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

While we are on the topic of design process and brainstorming, I will add a few of my thoughts. There is a great read out there Product Design and Development by Ulrich and Eppinger that provides a lot of insight into the design process. They list the Concept Generation, or brainstorming, portion of the design process as a five-step methofology:

1. Clarify the Problem
2. Search Externally
3. Search Internally
4. Explore Systematically
5. Reflect on the Solutions and the Process

A brief description of searching externally
One of the last subtopics in external search section is "Benchmark Related Products".

I do agree that it is important for teams to go through the proper steps before starting the brainstorming process (how are you going to play the game, what is the team's goal for what the robot has to do, prioritizing, etc.).

I am a fan of the 72 hour builds. I learned a lot by watching them, I can't say that we took what any of them did and placed it on our robot; but we did have some inspiration along the way.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

So I was lucky enough to be apart of Robot in 3 Days AND the actual FRC build season and here's my take on it:

From the stand point of the FRC build season:
My team was watching all the BB/Ri3D builds and the approach they took was to "look but not watch." What I mean by that is they looked at the builds but didn't take intensive notes. The students all had something they liked from the different builds but I always asked, "what could be done to make it better?" Our team started with the choo-choo but realized that it was very limiting as opposed to a pneumatic launcher. We liked the JVN collector and stuck with it only after we explored all the possible options. Even though we had several robots done in 3 days to "copy", we didn't finish our design until almost week 3. The BB/Ri3D builds overall helped our team by cutting down a lot of prototyping that we would normally do. We could easily look at a video of a mechanism that we were considering and see if it gave us the result we wanted.

All in all, I comes down to how you let the build influence your students. You can't control how they feel about it but you can force them to think it through by making sure they cover all of their bases on why they want that design for the robot.

From the stand point of a Ri3D build:
Going in, Team O-Ryon's purpose was to build a robot that could complete the simple game objectives and at the same time, be something a rookie team or a team that was low on resources could build and still be competitive. We knew that we had a lot of people watching and that whatever we build could and would be copied. We also wanted to make it difficult for teams to just sit down and copy it bolt for bolt, screw for screw. That's why we didn't CAD it and release any CAD. We got numerous emails and messages about when were going to release CAD or if we could CAD something for them and as tempting as it was, we didn't. We answered all questions but told teams to improvise because we knew our robot wasn't the best and that teams could make something better with 6 weeks to build.

Looking back, I'm glad we did the 3 day build because we met our goal. Teams built our robot (some carbon copies) and were able to be competitive at their respective regionals, some even winning. At the same time, the veteran teams were able to take what we did and iterate and take it to the next level. That was the main goal of Ri3D when it all started last year. Not to build a robot FOR a team but to build a robot that a team could see complete the game challenge in week one and to give them a foundation to start with so that the overall competition level at all regionals could be more leveled thus getting all the students a better overall experience of FRC.

Re: Looking Back: 3 Day Robots
 

Saying that ri3d reduced variation in robot design is entirely confirmation bias. I think a lot of people are greatly overestimating how much design variation there has been in past years. Aside from 2013 I can't think of a single year that had as many truly unique robot designs as this year.

Team 3018 (Nordic Storm) was inspired by last year's robot in 3 days-- not their design, but rather the challenge of doing such in 3 days.

This year the students tried to build a fully functioning prototype robot and did a pretty respectable job of it. Their final design was largely based on their 3 day prototype. They used the drive train from our rebound rumble bot and focused on the manipulator and collector during the build, but the prototype was able to nominally do all aspects of the challenge that our final version could do.

3 day prototype:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE9H627YZyM

Final:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8sxcxqOOMA

It didn't hurt that we are a community based team and we had snow days Monday and Tuesday so they were able to build from Saturday@noon until Tuesday@noon. The original plan was Sat Noon-late, Sun 1-9, Mon 4-9, Tue 4-9 for roughly 30h or build time over a ~80hr period, but they worked pretty much all the waking hours Sat Noon-late, Sunday 1pm - Tue noon.

In the end, I think the decision to try to not just prototype ideas but prototype a complete functioning robot took us further faster than in years past. It certainly was a lot of fun and we wouldn't have considered it if it weren't for last year's Ri3d effort.