reply: Elevated Drivers
 

I love the idea of having an elevated drivers stand. It is especially hard to even see your robot if you'r at ground level with it. a more "aerial" veiw would definitly help. that would also be great because it is close to impossible to even see your bot if your's is the shortest on the feil and the tallest is parked DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF YOU!

P.S- and this is coming from me who is 6ft tall

It depends on the philosophy. If FIRST wants to see the best improvised play possible, with elements of suspense to the players, they should keep it the way it is. If FIRST wants to see the best possible play, with strategies fully explored and thought out, which I believe may be more exciting for the audience, they should announce the pairings at the beginning of the competition.

Personally, I vote for the second.

I would like to see another day added to the competition...

Wed. Unpacking, Tinkering, and Inspection Day
Thur. morning: Practice
Thur. afternoon: Qualifying Matches
Fri: Qualifying Matches
Sat morn: Qualifying Matches
Sat. aft: Elimination Matches

Wednesday would be used to unpack robots, tinker, and inspect. Only three team members would be allowed in the pits. The practice field would not be available for teams to use.

On Thursday, practice could start at 8:00 am, since robots are already unpacked and inspected. Since teams would be mostly ready to go for their first practice, you will have fewer no shows and teams can get the most out of their practices.

Although I love the chaos and adrenalin of the current practice day, it would make inspection much smoother if the number of people in the pits were fewer. Also, it takes us about 2 hours to get unpacked and ready to go, even when our robot is just coming out of the box. In three years, we have yet to make our first practice (usually scheduled for 10:00 am).

I envision that 1-3 team members would go out in advance of the team to get the robot prepped. On practice day, when the full team arrives, they would know that their robot is ready to go and could make the most of the practice and competition time.

This scheme would also give us another 1/2 day of matches, without increasing the amount of time away from school for the majority of the pre-college students.

Andrew
Team 356

That would be great. They are always in a rush between matches and if a close call comes up on the score it takes more time. We would have more time to set up a more organized pit area for more efficient fixin'. There would also be the possiblility of testing robots on a tether just around the arena/event site. This time could also be used for some intense strategizing as most teams plan strategy in the minute or so they have before the starting buzzer of their match. Also, this time would help rookie teams (or any team for that matter) work out the problems with their robots. And if your robot is absolutely perfect and your strategy is all worked out, you can still go around the pits to get the inside scoop on team 123's drive train or ball shooter etc.

There are just two concerns I have.

1. There would be a lot of school work to make up after being out for 3 days or more depending on travel.

2. I would not want to see teams take advantage of this time by using to add a variety of illegal parts and/or mechanisms or fabricate something new or make darastic changes or anything illegal like that.

I think this is a very worthwile idea. What does everyone else think?

I think these are good ideas, but might need a few changes. It would be nice to have an extra day, but that racks up the expenses for teams that have to stay in hotels. It also brings up the issue of missing school which was mentioned. I think only three people allowed per pit is a little small. You are going to be crowding your own pit, so if teams want to be cramped, they should have the option. Id like to see that raised to at least five. This plan also costs first more, because they have to rent out the facilities for an extra day, which is quite expensive. To rent the San Jose state event center was something like $8000+ a day, but overall these are good ideas

How about have...

Thur. Unpacking, Tinkering, and Inspection Day
Fri. morning: Practice
Fri. afternoon: Qualifying Matches
Sat: Qualifying Matches
Sun. morn: Qualifying Matches
Sun. aft: Elimination Matches

You would still only miss two days of school, but you would spend your whole weekend with robotics. (if that is even a bad thing ;) )
Any thoughts about that.

Good idea, but FIRST should keep competitions off of Sunday for two reasons. First is that many people like to attend religious services on Sunday. Second is that teams that travel to competitions would return home late on Sunday and wouldn't be well rested for work / school on Monday.

Mike

I would keep the extra day on Wednesday so I have time to recover after the comp. I think if it could be on Wednesday with no additional costs other than travel, and as many people allowed in the pits as normal, that would be great. Besides, what would you do on that day if you weren't in the pits? Also, for teams who do not have the funding, this day would not be mandatory to attend. But that does make it kind of unfair though. Hmm. Still has some bugs to work out. Someone else want to give it a try and make it work??

I have a problem with this plan for personal reasons: with teams only having 1-3 members in the pit it causes problems for teams that had problems during the build season. Any team at the NYC regional should remember all for the problems we had due to our engineers bailing on us during the build season. Thanks to fully staffed teams like 237, 810 and 340 (not to mention many others) we were able to compete with a working robot by the end of Thursday. With the plan proposed we would only have unpacked our robot and done minor repairs, we also would have missed all of our practice matches and some qualification rounds. Therefore, we would have been victimized for an occurrence out of our control

Thankfully its going to be my team next year if the school ok's it

While extending the event to another day would be nice...there's a number of logistical and other issues that would need to be resolved first...

-Almost every event has the equipment brought to it from another site. At every site I've worked, the truck is packed before we leave Saturday night(well, I guess Epcot is the exception), and then leaves Sunday morning for the next site. If the opening of the event was pushed back, setup would have to start on Monday morning(your average regional takes 2 days to set up), which would only give one day for the truck to get to the site.

-FIRST also uses the time between events as a "breather," to keep from going completely insane during the 6 weeks :). If things were pushed ahead, they would not get this very important day off...

More on the extra day...
I threw out the idea (and it wasn't original to me. I'm sure I stole it from someone else) and didn't really think about all the logistics.

I had assumed that FIRST must have the site under their jurisdiction on Tuesday and Wednesday to set up the playing field, shop, pits. If they set up the pits first on Tuesday, they could be setting up the playing field on Wednesday, while we have access to the pits. I don't know the details about how FIRST works their magic, but this looked like a "no cost" solution.

I would recommend the 3 members at a time to keep the pits cleared. 5 members per team would be fine too. 20 members per team results in chaos, although it is the best chaos on the planet.

My original thought would be that 3 (probably adult) members of the team would fly/drive out the day early and that the rest of the team would come a day later. This would make the additional team expenses minimal.

The bad part of this, of course, is that fewer people would get the experience of unpacking the robot, tweaking, and seeing it start to come to life.

This year, I think we had a minimum of 10 people (mostly pre-college students) working in our pits from 8am-8pm on each practice day.

On the other hand, teams would be more likely to be inspected and would have more time to get their robot running.

I actually think that teams who have problems in the build season (we were one in our rookie year in 2000) would have more "mental space" to get them resolved. With a less crowded (and noisy) pit and with the focus on getting unpacked and running (instead of also trying to make your practices) teams should be able to focus more on solving technical problems.

Since you will know in advance how much work you would have to do, it might be possible to petition the regional to allow extra personnel into the pits.

Above all, the objective for FIRST is to have all robots performing well in competition, while maintaining a balanced playing field for all teams.

Andrew
Team 356

Another thing to keep in mind is with the current schedule....the field, pits, and other equipment gets set up simultaneously...meaning that in most cases, the robots do not arrive until sometime Wednesday afternoon

What about the teams w/ no adults and almost no members present w/ experience with a FIRST competition and no other support really but the other teams and the volunteers? With the schedule the way it is now everyone has the same time and the same chance to correct everything wrong w/ their bot

Better Food / Food availabliity
 

On the topic of food, I feel that this is quite a problem at the LA Regional. While there were sufficient fast food places nearby, there weren't inside the event site. We were not allowed to bring any food at all into the arena and were forced to pay for overpriced sodas and very old pretzels. Come on... 5 grand for that? We have how many kinds who are in there all day for each of the three days and it'd be nice if we could bring in our own food to have something decent to eat.

As to extra days...
This would add an immense expense to each competition. The cost is usually the same whether you are doing anything in the venue or not. If you book it you are paying by the day/hour for the use of the hall and electrics, security, clean up, etc. I would suspect that any of the midwest venues we use would be in the neighborhood of $30k+ a day with east coast being even higher. I know at the Midwest Regional, the site is cleared on Saturday evening with the bigscreen, speakers and cameras packed before the video crew can go home. Add to that the sheer numbers of volunteers who need time off. The Motorola volunteer staff (non-robot team) for Midwest Regional is enormous so I suspect other regionals are equally staffed.
As to the food issues, I agree that food is an issue. Part of the deal on the venue includes getting the concession people some profit. So that makes it neccesary for there to be no outside food. OK, so place and order and eat outside if you can, but some events are fundraisers for the home team or the local schools so use your own judgement and support the locals when you can.
As to parts, there was a requirment to document the cost of parts and matierials and not exceed a certain amount. I think that would keep the design more equitable and hold teams to more real world constraints. I know there are mechanical guys who will disagree here, it does add to the workload.