Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Rookie team here, still trying to sort things out. One of our mentors proposed an intriguing idea: Build a "practice bot" almost identical to our primary bot to give us something to practice with during the month of downtime between the robot ship date and competition.

We found nothing explicitly prohibiting this in the rules. Is this something that other teams routinely do? (Still waiting for our "mentor" team to be assigned...actually, we've pretty much given up on that happening!)

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

100% perfectly legal!! Many teams do this, to play with and learn from... Plus it's great for driver practice!

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

One thing you have to consider: resources. Do you have to money, time, manpower to build a second robot? Its not prohibited in any way, but considering the fact that you only have 6 weeks and a limited budget, its almost impossible to have a decent robot for the competition while making a practice robot. Unless you are making the practice bot just a chassis with wheels. Especially being a rookie team. While most veteran teams have robots from previous years, most rookie teams do not have that luxury.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

The majority of the more successful teams build practice robots. The teams I have been involved with the past 3 years have built practice robot and the help has been absolutely immense. If at all possible and it won't compromise other things then definitely build a practice bot.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Good point. We will probably have the resources for a practice bot, and we don't plan on building the second one concurrently. We'll just do our best to document what we have before we ship.

Now that we know the option is open, we can start planning for this.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

If you have the resources, you will probably find there is a real benefit to building a "practice robot" first and then use your design and lessons learned from that first one to build a second, competition robot.

The second one goes together much faster, and the electronics team, programmers and drivers have the first one to work and learn on.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

We build a practice bot with the "intention" of having it done by week 2 (most of the time we more likely see iy by week 3 or 4) and then build the final robot afterwards improving on what was learned from building the first robot.
It all depends on the time and resources you have to build it but I would highly reccomend you do it. It is a valuble resource to have for your drives team.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

We are building two -- one for competition, the other 'close enough' (because of cost issues in building two that are truly identical).

It is important to make the 'close enough' robot controlled exactly the same way as the competition robot -- and as close as possible mechanically as well.

...and while part of me envies the month between bag-n-tag and your first regional, part of me is very glad that FLR is week one!

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Even if you cannot make another full robot due to time, materials, money, etc having just a chassis is still worthwhile. It allows for driver practice among other things. If you can practice even for 3 hours (I mean actual drills, not just driving around) you will have more experience then most teams by the end of their season. That is a HUGE advantage!

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

We only have one Classmate this year and are working on a practice bot. Is there a way to run both robots, alternating? We also have only one wireless access point.

Thanks for any pointers!

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Could you try and find someone willing to donate or sell an old laptop at the least and install the Driver Station software on it so you have another Driver Station.

For the router problem I am afraid you probably will have to try and get another one. The robot is suppose to have a certain IP address in the network, you can't have both of them with the same address in the same network.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

By my count (Assuming they haven't broken their old ones) they should have 3. The Linksys DS radio from 2009, the Linksys gaming bridge from 2009, and the new bridge/radio from 2011.

There are two options for setup on this:

1. Run each as its own network. This would require two DS computers (including your Classmate, so you just need to find another one). You would run the practice bot using the pair of 2009 radios and the extra laptop, and the competition bot using the new 2011 radio and the Classmate. You would need two sets of driver controls as well, which might not be easy if you use the Cypress board.

2. Run one as a different team. Pick a team you like, or another number you won't forget. Image the practice bot as so, and setup the second laptop and old radios as well. In LabVIEW, you could create a new build specification for practice, which would just change the robot IP.

Or you could just not use them both at once. If you need to run another robot against the practice bot (maybe a boxbot or a kitbot or something for driver anti-defensive training?) you could just use an IFI control system. You wouldn't even need to program it (gotta love default code).

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I'll pass along the suggestions to our software team.

I'm personally thrilled that this is our third year and we've finally gotten to the point that we'll be able to test and do driver training.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Perfectly fine but I would like to share a bit of adbice:

1. Don't starve yourselves of resources to get the second bot done. Make sure you can build one good bot first.

2. The practice bot is for practice. After the main bot ships, you must keep the practice bot as close to the real one as possible, because that's what you'll have to work with at the competition.

I've witnessed what happens when you try to use a "practice bot" along with the withholding allowance to make the six week build season a nine week build season. It doesn't work at all.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

We've been using an older control system on the kitbot for programming practice, sensors, ect. We are working on making the control system swappable between chassis and using the KOP chassis for practice and a "real" chassis for competition. Of course once the 'bot ships we'll have the KOP chassis to practice with. (which just thinking it through means I need to order more sensors...)

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Just an input, we've done this for the last two years and it's 1.) AWESOME if you have a big team do keep them busy, 2.) great practice, 3.) perfectly legal, but 4.) takes time... as in finish the real robot first, then build this one along the way or even after if you can! We've made the mistake on working on both simultaneously and not focusing on the real one as much as we could have!

Good luck!

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

We've been building a practice robot for at least 3 years (including this one). We should be almost (if not completely finished) with our practice robot by the end of this week to the beginning of next week.

It shows off any flaws that may come out in a design before the competition, so you have time to improve it. Additionally, your drivers will thank you for it.

It is definitely something to seriously consider.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

A practice bot is always a good idea, if time and resources allow. This year we set up an old chassis with a 6 wheel drive like we plan on using. We are using an old VEX robot controller and RC 2 joystick controller to complete the mix. Granted we won't have all the functionality of our comp bot, but for driver practice it will work well.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

This year we're actually working on three robots: a prototype robot, a practice robot, and the competition robot.

The prototype robot was assembled, wired, and programmed entirely on our first meeting out of Kitbot parts and serves two purposes: give the programming team time to figure out sensors, drive code, autonomous, etc on a real robot, and provide a modular base chassis for us to prototype mechanism ideas on. Prototypes mounted on it have been built out of Kitbot parts, 80/20 parts, Vex parts, and whatever else we have lying around.

After all of the subsystems have been proven using prototypes on the prototype robot, we then move onto designing the entire final robot in SolidWorks. Once the design is done, we split up all the parts to a variety of different sources, including sponsors and our team machine shop, so we can have parts back faster. We also do this to incorporate a number of different fabrication techniques, to show our students different ways ideas can become reality.

Once the parts have been made, we assemble the functionally identical practice and competition robots almost concurrently, although the competition robot usually lags behind the practice robot by a few days due to powder-coating lead times.

Re: Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?
 

Our team builds two robots every year. First we build a prototype bot, this is usually finished by week 3, 3 and a half. After we build this bot we use what we learned from building it to build a "flight bot" that we send to the competition. This flight bot is much easier to build because we know exactly what to do. After ship date we use the prototype bot for driver practice. Having a practice bot (and extra driver practice) before regionals is absolutely game changing. I strongly recommend you build one if possible.