RI3D this year?
 

I haven't seen anything about doing a Robot in 3 Days this year, I'm hoping that is because nobody is doing it... Anybody know?

Jack

Re: RI3D this year?
 

A little birdie told me there were even more groups doing it this year than last year; I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I haven't heard anything about Build Blitz but rumor has it that Ri3D is a go with more teams this year.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I really hope there's another build blitz/Ri3D. Does anybody know if Vex plans to update their product line again for this year?

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Check the ad at the top of the chief portal. They are announcing new products on Dec 16th. Also VEXpro.com has the 16th date as well for product updates.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

What is your reasoning for not wanting it?

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Didn't like it?

Re: RI3D this year?
 

See this thread for some various points of view on RI3D/ Build Blitz projects.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Although I enjoy watching the build, I feel like it dilutes the robot gene pool. Too many Ri3D robots showing up at competition for my taste.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I know that a lot of people dislike the fact that the Ri3D groups produce a crop of robots that ends up being very limiting for many teams. It's tempting to just go for the option that you already know works (because one of the Ri3D teams built it), and while I think that these designs can be useful for rookies or teams with less resources, it does seem to have somewhat of a limiting effect on teams' creativity.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Ahh thanks! I completely forgot this thread even happened...surprisingly.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

The usual reasons I see are something along the lines of this:

By running through a lot of the prototyping, with lots of teams watching, there are a lot of what you might call "copycat" robots. These robots take the designs and just build those, whichever ones they like, rather than taking the IDEA and running with it, or developing their robots fully independently.

These are valid reasons, for some folks. For others, those robots are exactly why Ri3D exists...


I'm a fencesitter on this one; I can see both the risk of copycats and the "oh, hey, this works, how do we optimize it for our current design/manufacturing situation" factor at play. Therefore, I remain undecided.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Agree with all above on fence sitting.

We were a Ri3D "copycat" last year (technically BuildBlitz). We had a near 100% rookie team of students/mentors who had no concept of how to solve the challenge, build a robot, or even identify basic tools. Forcing a student led design would have likely resulted in us not completing a robot on time or it not being executed well.

We ended up with a respectable (though not super consistent) robot that performed well enough to get our team excited. Now we have a crop of returning students that are able to communicate some design ideas, better iterate on robots, and have more potential to make design contributions this year.

So... I believe we are proof that Ri3D does have a place in the "inspiration" category. I still believe it is both more inspirational and educational for a team that knows almost nothing to "copy" a competitive design and tweak it to fix all the issues that arise from poor execution, than for the team to build something completely original that is inherently flawed. Once a team starts to build team IP and original ideas, Ri3D should become less useful.

However, the number I saw thrown out there recently about ~10% of the team submitting FIRST choice orders on time reminds me that we on Chief Delphi are the minority. We still have a large number of teams out there that lack the mentorship to execute original and competitive designs on their own... and building a Ri3D bot is probably better than building a kitbot drive base with a non-functional mechanism.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Given how much thought is put into these games I would absolutely say the GDC has the meta for what a good robot might need. Last year that was a quick efficient intake and high angle launch mechanism that over shoots any defensive options. The GDC does a good job of establishing meta through its animations without giving too much away (it why they always use the crazy mechanisms like the boot that kicks the ball perfectly) and the game design is consistent enough that even without RI3D with all the resources that you can access in the end you are going to have a lot of robots that look very similar because they all are going for the same goal.
Hope that makes sense I re-wrote it a few times...

Re: RI3D this year?
 

They better be doing it!

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I think a lot of it is just convergence. A catapult with an overarm roller was what a lot of teams used just for simplicity. It might be that a few teams copy them, but I for one feel the need to tweak designs to my liking.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I enjoy Ri3D/BuildBlitz and think they provide an important resource for many teams, and have a notable benefit in raising the floor of robot quality at competition.

That said, I think the scale may be getting a bit out of hand, and am not too pleased by the prospect of even more teams doing it.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

How come, specifically?

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I am, once again, excited by the prospect of the Ri3D type builds. For my team, it was an encouraging factor last year, though their design ended up having nothing in common with any of the 3 day builds. May as well jump in this dispute early: I saw far fewer direct copies on the field last year than I expected, and plenty of variation and adaptation. I'm for it.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I know this topic has been addressed before, but I wanted to add my thoughts, though they probably don't mean too much.

I agree with the others who are on the fence. On one hand, Ri3D may be squandering robot creativity and design - that would be the most immediate observation. I know that on Kickoff 2014, I expected a ton of copies of 1114's Simbot SS. However, while that did happen, there were many variations of it and even more radical designs ranging from catapults to even a certain wheeled-shooter, so I still think there was a healthy amount of ideas out there. Moreover, I think a lot of the teams that appeared to be copies of Ri3D may have arrived there by coincidence - a low launching catapult with a horizontal roller bar is a pretty simple solution to Aerial Assist as I'm sure many teams found out.

On the other hand, Ri3D gives many teams who are struggling a basic idea of what they could possibly do. I would much rather see a copy of one of these robots than an immobile box or barely functional/inefficient mechanism. I don't even know what percentage of FRC teams, especially rookies even know about Ri3D, what with the vocal minority on CD sometimes. In the end, I think it come down to personal opinion - some will dislike it, and some will appreciate it.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

There's a difference between having one or two baseline competitive robot designs presented for teams who need it, and having a massive group of professional engineers thoroughly tearing through the problem. I think a lot of the complaints people have about the potential negatives are exacerbated in the latter case.

I also found that the effective signal-to-noise ratio seemed to suffer a bit when trying to keep track of a large number of teams.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Darn. When you describe it like that, it sounds really inspirational and awesome.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I support Ri3D, if only for confirmation of dominant strategies. Because of Ri3D, my team was able to confirm within three days that the majority of teams would attempt a shooter. We then built our strategy around complimenting that shooter by inbounding and catching truss passes. Without the Robot in 3 Days projects, there's a fairly large chance that we would have been just another mediocre shooter and ranked very poorly at Hub City.

Inspiration doesn't necessarily have to stem from copying a design. It can also be derived from developing a complimentary strategy.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I don't find watching professional engineers thoroughly solving FRC problems in the first three days of build season particularly inspirational or awesome, in the same way that as a student I wouldn't have enjoyed having our robot made for us by a professional, no matter how good the robot.

To each his own, I guess.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

That's probably because you're not a student who kills themselves for their team.... and that team doesn't have mentors.

That kid needs every bit of resource he can get, and thinks like Build Blitz are AWESOME for them.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Robots will continue to look quite similar due to the rules. There is only so much anyone can do differently. And even if they don't look the same most will fundamentally operate the same. I wouldn't call one robot running WCD with belt on vex pro 4in DT versa wheels all that unique from one running colsons with #25 chain. Evidently teams will narrow down to the easiest, most consistent, and cost effective method to play the game. Then you have set actuators, controls, weight, size, battery capacity. It is very hard not to "copy" someone out there. Unless the rules got much looser not to much will be worth doing too differently from anyone else. This is of coarse from the view of lowest cost, build time, and build difficulty for a given performance level. If you care less about these than the limit is infinity.

If there is one area I see realy meaningful advancement in it is code, controls, and sensing.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I don't think this year's Ri3D/BuildBlitz provided a significantly better resource for struggling teams than the single team in 2013. I do think it did a lot more to trivialize many of the engineering challenges for teams that have a lot to gain by doing it themselves.

As I said originally, I do think it is a good resource to have (our 2013 robot would not have existed without it). However, I do think there exists a point at which it is too much, and if we were not past that point this year then we were very close to it.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

You know, if there were more RI3D teams, there would be a wider range of bots to copy. In fact, an increase in the number of RI3D bots would allow for low-resource, low-experience, low-budget, and/or low-originality teams being presented with a lot of ideas and having the opportunity to choose between the bots presented to them. They could even design a hybrid of several of the robots and several of the ideas presented to fit a strategy.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I said this in the last thread, and it is still relevant.

I think how people perceive Ri3D really depends on the type of year it is. For a year like 2014, other then a few odd solutions, there were not too many basic different ideas on how to play the game. This meant Ri3D basically was basically able to show every basic idea that was feasible for the year. Had there been 6 Ri3Ds in 2013, I bet all 6 would have been completely different. And it still wouldn't have touched every strategy that could win in that game.

If the game has a higher mechanical ceiling, more Ri3Ds will most likely be much different, vs a game where there is a much lower mechanical ceiling.

And I for one don't care what Ri3D does to the better teams. If it brings up the floor, and allows rookies and smaller teams to build better robots, then why should the better teams care. Bringing up the floor and improving competition is inspirational and the only thing that matters.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

You know, some (most?) of those types of teams seem to have the idea that you need to design the robot first and then fit the strategy to the robot. That's one way to do it... but it usually doesn't work out very well.


More competitive robots = good. Playing with and against 5 or 6 poorly-executed copies of the same robot = not so good. I'll give it a couple of years more at least before I make up my mind.


As a note, 1197 did attempt an El Toro last year after seeing Ri3D. Our high roller bar was slurping up balls with no issues, and the El Toro had Issues with a capital I, made maybe to Week 3.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

We at 4464 abandoned El Toro fairly early for just this reason. Looked very simple in the video, but tuning it was a real pain and it just wasn't as reliable as the overhead roller.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

In FRC and in industry, teams are presented with problems, variations of which have been solved many times over in the past. It's very difficult to solve these problems in a completely original way. It is an accepted and sensible practice to seek out and draw from existing solutions.

Ri3D is a set of open source solutions to a more specific problem to which your competitors also have free access. This situation doesn't break a market or an FRC competition, because the open source stuff isn't good enough to win the game. It's just the baseline. Better solutions are waiting to be identified, and it's also possible to execute the existing solutions better in many different ways. Plenty of room for innovation exists even in the presence of products that already work well.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I'm seeing a lot of the same arguments that popped up in the last thread show up here again. While everyone is free to their opinions, a bit more of an open mind would be much appreciated.

One thing in particular strikes me as particularly overgeneralized and perhaps misunderstood-- when people are talking about Ri3D, it's very common to hear generalizations like "Many teams were just straight Ri3D clones," or "Teams don't learn as much because they have preexisting plans to work from"-- or "Teams would be much better off if they just did _____." I'd like to urge the people making comments along these lines to perhaps take a broader view of teams-- understand that the "stereotypical rookie" is just that-- a stereotype. Every team has a huge multitude of unique complexity to it based on the people involved, location, access to sponsors, etc. To presume that there is an objectively correct way for them to approach a problem (or that you or I, people who likely know very little of their full situation, can quickly identify that solution based on a few paragraphs of text and tell them whether they're learning enough or meeting the goals of FIRST), to me, is doing a great disservice to the problem(s) at hand.

It also strikes me as a little bit odd that people seem to be assuming that none of our hypothetical new teams are going to be trying anything new in terms of community interaction or resources. Do people really think that the previous two Ri3D competitions are a full representation of what groups can do with the challenge? I can think of several different things teams could do during and after the three days that haven't been done by existing teams (at least publicly).

Lastly, a couple of things for the people who think that Robot in 3 Days isn't as useful of a resource as it could be, or are on the fence about it:

What sort of content do you think would be most beneficial for Ri3D teams to release (during or after the three days)?

If you think there are too many "Ri3D clones" out there, what do you think Ri3D teams can do (other than completely stop the competition) to mitigate this effect?

What do you not see Ri3D teams doing that you wish they would do?

Overall, what would you like to see changed about how Ri3D teams approach the challenge?

PS: There's nothing about Robot in Three Days that says only professional engineers can compete...

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I'd rather see more Ri3D clones than the usual amount of motionless bricks at competition.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I'd prefer it be deeper in the build season (or after). But for the same reasons that we don't want our teams to talk robots during the first phase (game analysis) I'd rather my students not get their ideas from Ri3D. I don't think it's good for the sport...

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I like RI3D, and certainly hope that there will be some teams doing something like that this year. However, echoing some of the thoughts that peopled have stated, it can be annoying if you think of a great idea, and then figure out that RI3D did it. You don't want to seem like an unoriginal copy cat.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

As a team, we study the Ri3D robots. But we don't study them as robots per se, we study their approaches to the game and their strategies.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

More information is always a good thing, and coming from talented mentors and engineers all over the country is even better. My only gripe is that in general the Ri3D and BuildBlitz teams all focused on the glamorous tasks instead of presenting the MCC or support/utility robot designs.

Nearly every year we come to the point where hundreds of teams would have done much better designing for the support tasks.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I agree completely. I personally would love to see one of the Ri3D teams solely focus on the MCC or other support tasks, and have clear documentation on the process by which they determined why this would be advantageous for any team. The majority of teams will always be better off building robots like these instead of complex ones that are designed for the game's "primary" (for lack of a better word) objectives.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Here's the thing about RI3D. They show you concepts, but teams still have to do the hard part - making it work! You can't just arbitrarily slap a catapult together and expect it to meet your performance requirements on the first try. It still takes good problem solving skills and creative thinking to take a concept presented in the RI3D machines and making it work for you.

Nick

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Reading complaints about Ri3D I can hear Joe Walsh singing “I can't complain but sometimes I still do” in the background. It’s surprising that the community doesn’t complain about pictures/threads about drivetrain ideas, how to build bumpers, pneumatics, calculating power using multiple motors or countless other items in White Papers. It only seems to be concerned about sharing ideas on how to obtain and score the game piece(s) somehow as being an unfair competitive advantage or stifling creativity. I can only say “Life's been good to me so far” and personally think Ri3D is a case of “Coopertition®. Founded on the concept and philosophy that teams can and should help and cooperate with each other even as they complete. Rather than taken as a case of “I'm lazy but it takes all my time”.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

This:
Even copying the Ri3D guys can be a challenge for mechanically disadvantaged teams. A suggestion that building a competent non-flashy robot is a good strategy would be a move in the right direction.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

There were zero Ri3D / BB bots on Einstein last year.

Each robot on Einstein came from a process developed by and for that team. Some of those processes might have involved looking at, and evaluating, Ri3D and BB designs and ideas.

It worked for them, and it was all pretty inspiring to me.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

There are three things you do not bring up on a date: Religion, Politics, Exes.

There are now three thing you do not bring up on a date with an FRC member: Mentor vs Student Build, How drive teams are selected, and Ri3D opinions.

The first two have been around awhile and have merit to be debated but sometimes I feel that the last one makes for some interesting gripes that I shall highlight:

Teams just copy their idea instead of designing their own:
If you are upset about this why not go to those teams, who are most likely less fortunate then yours, and offer them use of your facilities, mentors, or even to sit in on your strategy sessions. I think most teams who just straight copy a design (whether Ri3D or a previous robot from a similar game) have less resources, thus they can't spend as much time developing a design or strategy as they need a lot of time to actually build the machine.

It makes for less inspired students:
I feel this one is a double edged sword, I know most of the original Ri3D crew since I am from Florida, and they are nearly all alumni how cool is that to students to know that these people went from having to pour blood, sweat and tears for 6 weeks can now build a similar product in 3 days? It shows that you can become a skilled engineer at a young age to many students who only have mentors 20 years older then them.

Now the bad part is that in terms of inspiring for the here and now I can see where people come from, thinking up a weird unique idea then seeing it work is one of the most inspiring things when on an engineering project and these builds can prevent said ideas from happening, on the other hand when you are a low resource team like described above you may not have the ability to pull of said design and it may prevent you from thinking about something unique even if you have the resources to pull it off down the line.

It wasn't that bad with only one group but now there are too many
This one mostly comes from the idea that it is limiting the number of unique robots that are at a competition, thus making it less exciting. I can honestly say if you took a black and white picture of every robot in Florida, with no numbers or logos, I could tell you which team it came from with about a 90% accuracy. The more of these that people "copy" the more unique robots appear, due to combining aspects of each one. I feel like down the line if we still only had the original crew, that this would be a problem since designs would be severely limited in a challenging game. (As an aside there is still only 1 game where i felt more then half the field looked the same and that was 2010)

It is not allowing teams to fail
This is one that is not said to much publicly but I have had it discussed with me in private. You can learn a lot from failure, it teaches you more then victory. I feel people who make this argument are what people describe as middle of the road teams, teams who are consistently good enough to be in eliminations but are rarely the alliance captain, the reason for this complaint is it makes the middle of the pack bigger thus teams are more likely to miss eliminations due to a plethora of similar teams. That being said I both agree and disagree with the first reasoning for wanting teams to fail. Yes it allows for growth when you are almost embarrassed to see your robot on the field and never want to be in that position again, but for the other members of your alliance, as it has been said time and time again, I would rather have a Ri3D clone then someone who doesn't function on an alliance.


These are just the arguments I remember off the top of my head, if more of them come out the wood works I will respond further :D

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Aspects from all of the Ri3D robots can be used to move through the build process quicker by knowing what works and doesn't work. The idea that people shouldn't be able to be inspired by ideas created by other teams in unreasonable. They proved that a catapult was a good IDEA and could work if done right. They also proved the over the top intake would also work. Cheesy poofs had a variation the over the top intake that worked much better then the originals because they innovated the design to make a more superior robot.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

This was relevant in 2013, and it's still relevant now.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Intuitively, sure. However, last year's evidence doesn't really suggest the results scale like that.

In 2014, every design pursued some sort of catapult launcher. All but one used an overhead roller for accumulation. Only O-Ryon differed significantly in terms of the strategy pursued for their robot.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

While you're at it, also don't ask your date about adult drive team coaches or eliminating the bag and tag deadline.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I would add Adult vs Student Coach to that as well :)

Edit: The guy above me is smart.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I don't see how people think creativity happens in a vacuum. You need influences! its been proven many time that more influences promote creativity. There is a whole chapter on this in Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. That's the easiest source I can cite.

Pablo Picasso as a student would practice by copying masterpieces. He was learning how to paint skillfully but also deconstruct the works' artistic elements. Those influences drove him to be completely creative and make cubism masterpieces.

Even without RI3D, there are influences on your creative process, knowledge from your education, past FRC robots, the car you drive and pretty much everything. Being creative is about harnessing those influences. Are you going to copy, riff on those variations or maybe throw it away? these are the skills students have to develop. You can't shut out the outside world and think they are going to have a unique perspective. Personally, I would be pretty upset if my students only looked at RI3D, but they don't. Some like cars, some have taken physics, some dug up a bunch of random videos of machines, some watch RI3d, some watch the Einstien matches of 08, some watch mythbusters and etc. Each bring their own perspective, their own mix of ideas. Some want to be outside the box as far a possible, some explore the box thoroughly.

I don't think shutting out influences makes you more creative. You have to learn how to analyze them. filtering all this is difficult. you will find that teams that use proven solutions often are creative but they simply did not have the wherewithal to test the unknowns.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Place me firmly in the camp of wishing for no RI3D or Buildblitz. Won't rehash all the same arguments.

What I would like to see - SI3D (strategy in three days) discussions / debates...or maybe "Robot In The First Three Days of Week Four" (RITF3DOW4).

Re: RI3D this year?
 

If I recall correctly, Team O'Ryon was a group of college students, many of whom are FRC alumni and continue to mentor FRC teams.

Due to the constraints that one has to work with (rules, materials, the laws of physics...) there are often only so many good solutions and many independent designs will end up looking similar. The nature of FLL is such that one tends to see much more diversity in design and strategy than in FRC. Yet, at the FLL World Festival, my son saw quite a few other teams from around the world who used strategies and (large and complicated) mechanisms very similar to ones he used. I really doubt that they copied him or that he copied them. They were more pleased and amused and not at all annoyed to see each other.

Many teams did not seem to have problems copying the small-wheeled shooter concept that our friends at Spectrum posted 11 days into the 2013 season. Quite a few teams copied the multi-directional ball collector mechanism that 973(?) used in 2012. So what's the problem with copying what one of the RI3D teams did?

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=111360

The relatively simple approaches the RI3D teams implement are probably about right for less experienced, low resource teams to emulate. Due to the short time (3 days), there are only so many approaches that the RI3D teams can experiment with and implement. Some approaches just require too much time to prototype and build. With no disrespect, I don't believe that any of the RI3D teams could have implemented anything like the climbing mechanisms implemented by 254 or 1114 in 2013.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I wasn't calling for complex mechanisms, simply pointing out that more teams doesn't automatically invite a large diversity in conceptual designs. With the exception of O-Ryon, all the teams focused on scoring in the high goal and loading off the ground as their primary functions (and O-Ryon ended up with high goal capability, anyway). They didn't focus on passing to other robots, inbounding from the human player, scoring in the low goal, or catching. If anything, Ri3D teams overshot the mark for a large portion of their key audience in 2014 (as already discussed in this thread).

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Big fan of Ri3D and Build Blitz and I am among those who look forward to evaluating their results and facilitating a thorough discussion among our team and using that data to inform our concepts as we come to consensus on our design basis.

My personal aspiration for our team is that we are among those teams which are fully playing the game with a robust, competitive robot. The input from these experienced mentors has been invaluable to us.

I find the discussion concerning the absence of a MCC design interesting. I assumed that the examples of robust, competitive robots delivered in 72 hours, including a design package, would enable anybody to copy and execute, thus raising the floor of the competition. I believe we performed better for it and I know that it increases the excitement and retention for us. I suspect that is true for many others.

If that is not true for some, how could it become true for them? Having one or two of the groups committed to MCC? Is the unique game design of 2014 a contributing factor what would be MCC?

Re: RI3D this year?
 

God this fence I'm sitting on is killing me...
On one hand you are forcing creation of strategy by taking a high level group and saying "this is what they are doing"
some people would say
"well if they are smart and they know what they are doing why wouldn't we copy it"
Honestly I don't know how I feel about that.
One thing I will say is that if this has the ability to give a starting team a footing and a presence so they can continue and build up I am all for it.
Gr8 Db8 M8s 8/8

Re: RI3D this year?
 

What's crazy is I think the team JVN bot was better than 80% of teams this year.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Sure I'll comment on this..... Last year I was very critical of the Ri3D and their impact on the program, since the thing that is most important to me is the creativity and innovation in designs it is obvious that some of that "ah ha" can be take away with watching all of the 3 day robots.

On the other side of things my team like to be competitive at competitions that we attend. As vince Lombardy said "winning isn't everything, but wanting to is.." Last year when my team looked at all of the Ri3D robots it pushed us to think "how will be be better than that. Since almost every team sees those ideas, most will be atleast that good."

On another note about it's impact to competition, I love having more functionally scoring machines available for 2nd picks in alliances. Over the years it has become easier to find 2nd pick robot that can actually contribute to an alliance instead of just trying to find one that can barely drive. This elevation in play will also enable more interactive games to be designed.


Here is the bottom line. If your team doesn't like Ri3D because you are worried about loosing the creativity, don't watch them. If your team has a great process already, use them to help you push your design strategy to the next level. If your team needs ideas and suggestions, study what the Ri3D teams do and use that information to help yourself be successful.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Your statement is true, but I don't think it's crazy.

In my mind it would be unreasonable to expect even the majority of teams to create as good of a robot as these 3-day robots. I laid out my reasoning why I think this in a similar thread not too long ago.

On a side note, this is why I would love to make a simple robot that could reliably just make eliminations as a 2nd pick in 3 days. Most teams should not be trying to build a robot that will seed first at their competitions, which some of the Ri3D robots probably would have. There should be a robot out there right away after kickoff that any team can see and replicate to make sure they can do at least something in the game well. If Ri3D really is targeting the mid-lower tier teams, I think this is undoubtedly the way to go.

Since the teams that build the Ri3D robots are so good, maybe they could cut down on the amount of time available for work. 3 days might just be too much. #Ri2D Sort of joking, but not really...

Re: RI3D this year?
 

I for one hope that there are six or more RI3D robots, I'd love to see them play at a Week 0 event. I want the the strategy guy from the Poofs and Simbotics to then show us "strategy at a match" in action.

The side benefit is that it would end all this Paul vs. JVN smack talk and let Paul prove on the field he has the better robot :rolleyes:

Re: RI3D this year?
 

They could play a Week -5 event!

Re: RI3D this year?
 

If only there were some way to get all the teams together in one place to compete... I could see the logistics of it being difficult.

I am excited to see what the Ri3D teams come up with this year!

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Over the past year all of us at VEX Robotics have been paying careful attention to all these discussions on the pros and cons of the Ri3D and Build Blitz projects. We've taken this feedback and used it to shape the evolution of the 2015 version of Build Blitz. We'll be announcing all the details on December 16th along with the new VEXpro product offerings for the 2015 season.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Glad to hear this, I look forward to the reveal.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Yup with the distance between the teams getting all of the robots together at the same place and time for what would probably only be a few matches just isn't practical but it sure would be fun and interesting.

Re: RI3D this year?
 

CHALLENGE:

For both Ri3d and BuildBlitz, working with FRC HQ.

Bring 'em all to the BIG SHOW (most of the folks are going to be attending already, right?). Give 'em some field time. Compete 'em all, in whatever fashion all participants determine. Use as a demo for the public, practice dummies on the practice fields, you name it, come up with something.

And have all the tech specs there for perusal, strategy process, etc.


That might be a little more practical... Idea, do it as a workshop (more of a lessons learned than anything else, I guess).

Re: RI3D this year?
 

Use them to test Einstein? That would be pretty cool...