Re: A disturbing trend?
 

For the veteran teams, I would agree with your assessment. The BeachBots - a very effective scoring robot with ramps found themselves a fraction of a pound overweight. Their short-term solution was to remove one of their ramps. I believe they ultimately removed a redundant motor in their arm in order to allow both ramps to be installed on the robot. Their final weight was 120.0 lb.

Rookie and 2nd/3rd year teams had non-compliance issues - not using correct wire guages, missing distribution blocks, pneumatic components, etc. I think part of the issue is the number of rules that the teams need to wade through (there are 116 rules in Section 8 - Robot of the Game Manual) to build a robot.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

that is probably a significant part of it! Keeping track of what's happening here on CD is a great way to catch the typical problems ahead of time, though....people discuss the new or confusing or gotcha rules, which helps newer teams become aware of them.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

Actually, 638 did miss a couple matches, and 122 had to run to the field to make their first (Match 1) match.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

I can't say I saw this at the NJ regional - we were pre-inspected for weight & size around 11 am Thursday, then called for a full inspection mid-afternoon. I did not notice a crush Friday morning.

Maybe we're too flip in stating "it's not about the robot" ?? I mean, it really isn't, but maybe some teams are OK with the building experience and don't really care if they compete? I cannot imagine it myself, but who knows how some people think.

I agree with sanddrags's closing paragraph. Mentors and Coaches may need t step in with one or two weeks left, and take matters into their own hands if necessary*, to ensure that the team does not fail, and ships a robot that has a good shot at passing inspection. Mentors & Coaches also need to emphasize and hold the kids acocuntable for the rules - wrong gauge wire (for example) is simply inexcusable, for both the kids and the adults.

On 1676, we adults tru to stay out of it as much as possible, but we do check the work and insert wry comments at apropos moments (like "umm, is 24 gauge big enough for that spike? What do the rules say?")

Don

*That's the fun part, but we must try to resist the temptation.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

My oldest son, Matt, was a member of Team 16 (Bomb Squad). His role on the team was "compliance officer" and, basically, he verified the robot complied with the rules. I think this is a really good idea - the student can be the point-of-contact during inspections. A mentor can play the role of inspector while the student addresses the items. In this way the students and mentors being accountable to FIRST.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

I'll admit 1070 was one of the teams that was inspected friday morning (by 294's Andrew, who was amazingly nice enough to let 1070 go to their first match without a flashing light) since we were still working on the foot on thursday. i dont know what it was last year but this time, i think socal was used as a fix-it period before other teams' second regional so they were still making modifications on their robot. Does partial inspection on thursday count for anything?

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

I noticed alot of teams waiting. As soon as we got our robot out of the crate, we took it to the inspectors and passed weight/size inspection immediately. We then passed the rest of inspection once the inspectors began to make their rounds.

Now on Friday morning, there were only about 10-15 teams that needed to finish inspection...that is still quite a few too many.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

I'm wondering if the reason for this trend is unprepared teams, or not enough inspectors? I'm leaning toward unprepared teams.

At St. Louis we had about the same number of inspectors (8) that we have had for the last three years, and about the same number of teams (45). As in previous years we assigned one inspector to each row of the pits, so each inspector was responsible for six or seven robots.

As of pit closing time on Thursday there were 37 teams that had completed inspection, five that had minor items pending, and three that had major items pending. No team missed a qualifying match, but two came very close.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

The BeachBots (mentioned above) have a student/mentor team that is responsible to see that ALL robot requirements are met. We write up a detailed requirements document every year and check off the items as they are accomplished. Many of these requirements are in the rule book, others are "homemade" the result of experience. Many of the requierments remain the same from year to year, others change due to the game.

An example of a homemade requirement is one that "all extendables shall be retractable". We learned this one the hard way. "The robot shall shoot balls at a speed greater than 4 ft/sec and less than 12 ft/sec" is an example of a game driven requirement from last year.

If it looks like we will not be able to meet a requirement, we develop a plan for either accomplishing it or doing without the effected subsystem, on rare occasions we might rewrite the requirement some time during build.

In any case, we develop the requirements document BEFORE we start building or even designing the robot. It is a lot easier to hit the target if you know where it is.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

When our team left the pits about 5:30 Thursday night only 8 robots out of 37 had passed inspection at the Bayou. I was very worried Thursday night that a lot of our Friday matches would be 1 on 1 or 1 on 2 matches. Upon entering the pits on Friday morning all but 12 of the robots had passed. I was somewhat relieved until I started noticing robots competing with obvious major rules violations. It seems that the inspectors at the Bayou decided to just let stuff go. Wedge robots, duct taped up wheels to reduce traction, illegal parts used from previous kits, robots that didn’t meet height requirements, etc., etc., etc. Later I started noticing even more tape appearing on manipulators. When we asked the inspectors they said they were REQUIRING it. It seems that many of the robots were puncturing so many of the tubes that the refs and inspectors got together and decided that the best solution was to make the teams tape up the sharp points/edges. Uh, so now instead of penalizing teams for a violation of one rule we force them to violate another? Shouldn’t the teams have been required to either remove the sharp points/edges or remove their manipulator? We were flat out told that they were letting it go because there were so many rookies (13 of the 37) and it was un-GP to ask about it. Excuse me? Didn’t we all get the same rules on the same day?

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

There was a lot of that going on at Finger Lakes. It seemed like practice rounds only had one robot on each alliance. Its hard to say whose fault it is.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

At pittsburgh, the inspection process was not anything like in the past. We went through weight and box then they looked over the robot and passed it. We did not have to go back through before the championship rounds like in the past.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

At New Jersey I did notice a lot teams, mine included, that could not officially pass inspection until friday morning because we forgot/lost the PVC cap for the flag holder and couldn't go buy one until the end ofThursday when we left. Frankly, this was kind of embarassing that we missed it.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

At the Wisconsin regional (23 rookies out of 52 teams), if I remember correctly, we had about 12 teams not passing by the end of Thursday, but most of these were missing BOMs and final weigh-ins. I did spend Friday morning watching one robot being reassembled after the team found out on Thursday that they were two inches too wide and had to completely disassemble their robot to cut off two inches of the chassis. In the end I think that they only missed their first qualification match.

Re: A disturbing trend?
 

I noticed this problem last year at the regionals. This year we brought along four spare flag holders. We gave out one of them Friday morning at the Wisconsin regional.