Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

To help address the manipulator lack of quality I have witnessed this year, I will be publishing a manipulator white paper titled, "The Mighty Four Bar: FIRST Robotics Applications". This paper will go through the different types of 4 bars and how the 4 bar is the greatest manipulator type that can be used in FIRST. Its lightweight and SIMPLE design make it really easy for arm operators to control and makes it easy to fix. It can also be combined with other mechanisms like linear slides, turrets, and other 4 bars to enhance capablility.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

I think it's wrong to say there are "bad" robots this season.

Some teams just started off, their rookies, they might not know an "easier" way of something something and it's not like they have the money. The longer you've been a team the more knowledge you gain.

If they weren't a rookie team, maybe their robot wasn't really "bad." FIRST is a huge committment. It can be really hard to get there everyday to work. Maybe some teams just couldn't do that. And maybe some teams had ideas, it just didn't work as they had planned.

"bad robots in 07" wrong to say.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

First year here so i can't comment on the "drop in quality".
What we can do to improve the quality of 'bots in the future is much easier to deal with. SHARE what you know. Find the 2-3 rookie, or young, teams in your area and help them out. Share what you know about, drive trains, scoring devices and the rules of the game. Share your resources: mentors, programming and tools. This will help quality, nothing else.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

The enticement of pre-made wheels for exotic drives caused many teams with no experience with this kind of drive to give it a shot. Many discovered that it wasn’t as easy as it looked within a six week build time.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

You are right. Many veteran teams are willing to share their knowledge. Moreover, there are many resources on CD and FIRST websites.

However, this thread is discussing the drop in quality of robots overall through FIRST. There are not as many robots putting up tubes as tetras in the 2005 game.

Due to the variable nature of the tube and rack, I think it is harder for teams to adapt. The tube has been inflated out of FIRST specs at regionals, unintentionally. Some teams only designed their robots to work with the official specs. As we have seen through the years, if you design your robot to work with extreme precision of the game piece/object, you are going to be disappointed(most of the time, atleast). Another common trend is more than usual teams end up dropping their tubes because they are not gripped properly. And then, they try to put it on the rack and waste even more time because the tube will most likely drop on the floor anyway. Paul, I hope your white paper will address some of these concerns for teams interested.

The rack jerking around at times with no effort doesn't help either. It looks like many teams take a long time to get into position, and then if the rack moves, they have to reposition. Granted, the stingers are there for a reason and you can use them to your advantage to hold the spider leg in place. Many teams don't/cannot use it. As Billfred pointed out, it is also hard to replicate accurately. We have had to reprogram the heights of the spider legs at every regional - but that isn't so hard.

This is just my opinion. I had no intentions of offending anybody/team/robot.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

This is a tough game! We spent a great deal more time brainstorming this year than in years past. Early on we thought we had all the angles covered but we used the old wood worker adage, "Measure twice...cut once" and reevaluated our design. It was a full week before we started even the smallest assemblies.

I like to think the planning paid off. With the help of Teams 60 and 1013, we won the Arizona Regional. We missed hanging the auto keeper only once in all our matches. We hung 7 ringers in one match. We lifted several robots 15" off the ground (we decided against a ramp.)

I think many teams under estimated this years game. They took it easy early and never caught up.

Ken

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

In FIRST, there are no bad robots. Just robots that offer different levels of challenges.

Instead of KISS, many teams work to the concept of MICE.

Make It Complicated Everytime.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

I can think of a few reasons why our robot wasn't as good as it should have been.
1. Lack of experience. With half our team being rookies this year, they had little game or building experience. To make sure they were all part of the process and understood what was going on, we went slowly through the design (moreso than we should have).

2. Poor planning and follow-through. We should have taken notes on what we accomplished each day, and what was needed to finish each task. There was too much confusion, especially when key members were not there.

3. Game complexity. As was previously mentioned, this game is perhaps the most complex in terms of field elements. It took a while to get our heads completely wrapped around the intricacies of the game, and when we had built the Rack, we found it was even more difficult than we thought.

4. Lack of resources. Each part we had fabricated was done out-of-house by a gentleman kind enough to donate his time and materials (Fab2Order in Indianapolis - give him your business!). Unfortunately, this meant that there was a 2-3 day gap between part design and when we actually had the components in hand.

5. Trying to do too much. This being our third year, we really wanted to make a statement. Unfortunately, we stretched ourselves a bit too thin and wasted time on components that weren't worth it (the camera comes to mind)

6. Overestimating ourselves. We didn't do much testing; we had done a forklift in 05 and assumed we could do it again without difficulty. Wrong.

I do believe this is a worthwhile thread - by knowing our weaknesses, we can work on them and turn them into strengths. And we can be ready for them if and when they crop up again next year.
As a team, we've definitely progressed from 06 to 07. Although our robot did not perform as well as we would have liked, it gives us room to improve. Hopefully come IRI time the robot will show its potential.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

There is no such thing as a "bad" robot... There are always going to be some robots that can't do the task.. But one robot this year proved that anyone is capable of winning. Team 1516 realized early on that their gripper and their ramps weren't going to work out for them. So they scrapped them. Many teams would have lost hope in their robot if it was theirs or would think they wouldn't succeed in the regional. Well 1516 was basically a box with wheels with a pretty skilled driver and ended up winning the regional at SVR. I also think they only lost 1 match out of the whole thing (correct me if I'm wrong).. I admit at first I thought they were a bad robot (just a box with wheels that couldn't accomplish much) but I have much more respect for small teams that just put anything on the field. They were a better robot than us obviously (they won the regional we didnt) and we had one fo the top scorers at SVR. So that says a lot.

Im not quite sure if Im still proving my point, Im doing 3 things at once while writing this, but my point is you dont have to be good at scoring or have a good ramp to be a good robot. Just use 1516 as an example. They never scored one tube or had one robot ramped onto them but they were the 3rd seed and won the SVR regional.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

Once again I'd like to emphasize Karthik's change of the word "bad".

I think that this year's game brought on both the "bad" robots and extensive defense. Both of this year's game objectives were very difficult. Trying to make a manipulator capable of lifting a ringer is quite the engineering feat with lots of little issues (getting the arm to move, making the gripper move as intended etc.) as does trying to make ramps. Since the ramps cannot be rampy on the field, you have to design something that deploys during the match. I've seen a lot of robots that either get 1 ramp to deploy, both ramps get stuck halfway... etc.

It's a good thing that FIRST is raising its expectations for us, that it's trying to make our robots better and more technical knowledge is required. But personally, I prefer something like last year, where an offensive move (such as low goal scoring) can still be effective, and even teams with few or less skilled engineers can create an offensive robot that can compete. Last year, that's all our robot did was low goal, and we could still be effective.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

I agree, this year the design process was very important. We spent a couple weeks figuring out what the robot needed to do, and how to make it do that with as little complexity as possible. This required making a small mock up of the rack the day after kickoff, so we could see how hanging ringers worked from different angles....it turns out that we were able to score 7 ringers in one qualifying match also....with only one motor on the manipulator. We designed the arm to naturally hold the ringers at a nearly optimum angle, after picking them up off the floor.

The more complex the task, the more effort you need to put into refining the design. KISS means figuring out how to leave parts off the robot. It is not easy!

btw, all 34 robots were on the field at the AZ regional, there's nothing "bad" about that! And any non-scoring robot with a reliable drivetrain is still a valuable alliance partner.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

Once again this year, numerous teams missed practice (and actual qualifying) matches. This was a problem last year as well (Check out this thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ctice+matches), but I think it was slightly worse this year (practice faired about the same; but at AZ there were a significant amount of more missed qualifiers than in 2006).

I think part of the robots not functioning as designed can be blamed on the little practice time teams have; many don't finish their robot until right before ship (quite common, I know this is typical for us), but in the past two years many have been missing all their practice matches and even a few beginning matches. In this case you have no practice time until your first actual competition match; if you find a problem with your design at that point, the quick match schedule required for FIRST events means you won't get a chance to fix it until Friday night at best, after 3/4 of your qualifiers have been played. Going hand in hand with missing matches, this is the first year I have ever seen teams not passed for inspection when competition started; close calls I've seen, but never actual missed matches due to this.

I think the point that you need to get as much practice with your robot as you can needs to be emphasized a little greater in the future. I did not see any robots that were poorly held together, asking to be broken, I just saw a lot that had a gripper that didn't work quite as well as hoped, or ramps that weren't able to deploy right in all situations. A team cannot expect to semi-finish with the FedEx guy at the door, then use all of the practice matches as time to finish the robot, then use Friday morning as inspection time, and do well at the competition (I've seen it sort of happen once this year... but it's not something you can expect to work).

And why wasn't alot of this been a problem in the past? I don't remember many missed practices in 2005 or 2004 (they happened, but it would just be 3 on 4 matches, not 1 on 0), and I certainly don't remember any missed qualifiers, with the exception of a robot being completely manhandled one match and missing the next one for it. Inspection never seemed to be as big an issue either.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

I'm surprised so many teams can actually accomplish what they do from scratch. We totally miscalculated the amount of time we needed to put into the pre-season and build season.

Being a rookie team with no experienced drivers, builders, programmers, or mentors, we tried KISS. Luckily the game design allowed us to quickly discard trying to do anything with the game pieces, but still be interesting. Even with KISS, we only got one of our two major goals in the time allotted, the ramp. The drive train was a disaster.

This game is very complex and subtle, and the design decisions are hard to get right. Even experienced teams seem to have miscalculated the need for speedy, firm/angled game-piece control, and the need for positioning under heavy defensive pressure either with an extendible arm or a drive train with low gear that can push them into position.

There is a wealth of information on everything except manipulators on this web site, so we are looking forward to anything you can contribute to that. Next year maybe we can figure out how to arm ourselves.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

I was designing this crazy complicated ramp when the students came to me with a cardboard mock up of a simple two piece gravity deployed hinged ramp that would be easy to make and use. We build the whole thing in about two days. Simple, effective and it worked great.

KISS is the way to go.

Re: why sooo many bad robots in 07
 

I think FIRST should provide a crash course on drive train design class including but not limited to: proper mounting of motors, correct chains and sprokets to use, proper chain tensioners to use and mount.

This class would hopefully help all those so many teams with keeping their robot out on the field instead of their parts =). Just my .02.