A lot of good loking robots
 

I know I am just looking at pictures but i am seeing a lot of good looking well built robots this year. I think capping tubes most teams in the payoffs will be able to go tit for tat with each other. The mini bot race will be the biggest factor, and having 3 robots cap in auto the second biggest factor. I think by week 4 (most teams will have recreated sud 2 sec mini bots)this will turn out to be the most competitive field of robots first has ever seen. Looking forward to the nail biting endings.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Shaun, there are a lot of good looking robots, but where is 25's...? ;)

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I'm glad this game has a lot of quality tube scorers. The game is easier than 2010, which is a good thing as more matches will be competitive and exciting to watch.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2007nj_f1m2

With a mini bot lol

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Lol, kinda thought so.

8WD coming back? Or you sticking with 6?

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I agree, this is going to be fun!

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

As much as I think there will be some amazing creations this year, I still think the most "competitive" year was the 2002 competition. Will this year be one of the most? I think so.

And I think the 2001 competition was one of the most interesting years for robot appearance and mechanisms (since you didn't have to worry much about biffing and banging)

Back when the robot section of the rulebook was 6-8 pages long. 3-4 if they were double sided. :D

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

This is by far the most "perfectly competitive" game that FIRST has created. Although I have been impressed by all of the videos and promos that have been posted so far, there isn't a team that I have seen yet that is light years beyond the others in terms of speed and ability. The range of skill between teams has drawn closer this year.

Another item to consider is the fact that the speed of the minibot has a limit, and I think a good deal of veteran teams have already met that limit. By nationals, a team that wants a minibot under 2 seconds will in fact have a minibot that goes up in that time (with a decent deployment as well). When this happens, the focus will shift back to how fast teams can put up tubes. The speed of how fast teams can put up tubes also has a very small and competitive range.

I think people are going to be pleasantly surprised about how spectator friendly and exciting the matches will be, especially come elims and nationals. The only unfortunate thing about Logomotion is that there will be false starts with the minibots as the races begin to get more competitive. This could have been easily avoided if FIRST placed a 30" tall slip ring inside the base of the tower that would collapse at the 10 second mark to prevent false starts (think gates for motocross races).

Logomotion is the game that FIRST set out to create back in 2009 with Lunacy. A game that has a glass ceiling that ultimately levels the playing field for a lot of the teams out there. (For anyone that didn't know, one of the goals of Lunacy was to "level the playing field for all teams". It's debatable as to whether or not it worked, I still saw the same teams on Einstein that year as all the other years, but I digress.)

At the end of the day, this is a drivers game.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Any team paying attention by doing things like looking here on CD and using resources like the 2007 Behind the Design book should be able to design an effective robot this year.

Unfortunately, as we all know, most teams will not take advantage of these resources. So even though we have seen a lot of nice bots here on CD, I don't expect to see a significant increase in robot quality.

I'm more interested to see how this game evolves over the course of the season. I think the changes will be great. This is a year where we will see robots that are ineffective scorers evolve into effective runners instead of instantly turning to defense, and as always defense will change as we progress through the year. Also minibot evolution will be huge.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

This is normally a GREAT thing.

But when you have points dependent exactly on how good your partners are (minibot), it becomes basically a coin flip rather than a game of strategy and driving.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I agree -- which kind of sucks.
I thought this was an engineering challenge not a driver's challenge.

I don't see a lot of separation between teams at the elite level. I guess we'll train our drivers like crazy and hope our opponents screw up at a critical moment.

Of course we'll try to give them every edge possible with the robot via continuous improvement... but I'm not seeing that as providing any more than incremental gains. Very balanced indeed... Ugh.

-John

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Last year was, IMO, the hardest technical challenge FIRST gave us (really controlling a ball that you can't really grab, kicking, traversing bumps, and hanging were all difficult enough that few teams did all of them effectively). As a result, spectators at many regionals did not get to watch a competitve, high-scoring game until the playoffs, if at all. I wonder if this fact influenced the GDC's thought process...

This year is, IMO, the simplest technical challenge FIRST has given us in a long time. Merely hanging a tube and getting a minibot to climb a pole on a flat field are much simpler bars of success compared to last year. On top of that, there are plenty of resources (videos, photos, even a book) leftover from 2007 that teams can use to help them design tube-manipulating mechanisms.

The result is that even at early regionals or those with more high team numbers, you are far more likely to find competitive matches. To FIRST, I'm sure that is a "win".

For the teams on the other end of the spectrum, we just need to work that much harder to set ourselves apart from the crowd - making incremental improvements, as John said.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I must respectfully disagree to an extent...The engineering challenge is a small part of the vast cultural change we're making. This involves students, mentors, community members, universities, corporate sponsors, and a few others - people, not machines. Of course you know that John. I just don't want others reading this thread to lose focus that a large part of that work is already done-build phase - teaching and mentoring. I know this season has been a HUGE life-changing process in the 33 students on my "rookie" team.

The competition adds a bit more learning and more cultural change. In my opinion it is icing on the cake.

To the OP, I think that this will be an exciting year and very competitive teams and regionals will blossom. Wish I could be at St. Louis to watch the fun this year. Einstein will be crazy to watch, even more fun if you're in it.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

To add to alot of the comments here already. I think FIRST by creating the game this year that they have, eliminated the engineering thought process except for in the minibot deployment and building.

I think any team that was around for any reasonable time in 2007 will be right to do well and many of the robots that we saw win regionals and championships in 2007 will be copied.

From everything I have seen here there are really on 4 robots to be built this year.

1 - 148/1902 style 4 bar linkage
2 - 233 style extending arm
3 - a single jointed arm
4 - 25/118 style multi stage elevator

I think this year will be competitive, it will help some of the teams that have difficulties during build season, because they will be able to rely on past years learnings from other teams and see what works and what doesnt. But in the end it reduces the total amount of engineering ingenuity present in this community, because we are all still engineers and probably strongly believe "Dont try to reinvent the wheel"

Hoping for a fun season ahead regardless :)

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

We have seen pictures and videos of many good looking and well performing robots. But what about the 1950-odd teams that haven't posted anything? I don't think that we have been looking at a representative cross section of the population. To be sure, some great robots remain to be seen, but I suspect that most of the teams that struggled the most are among the "missing" on CD.

I think this was a very difficult technical challenge. It really involves three completely independent functions (4 if you count the drive chassis) - Tube manipulator, Minibot deployment system, and Minibot. You can't ignore any of them. However, since there are some natural limits that may tend to normalize the high end of what can be achieved, strategy and teamwork will become a larger factor as the season wears on. That will be fun to watch.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I honestly love this years game, it is going to allow robots do what they were built for (score tubes without interference) but make the path to and from the scoring zone one heck of an experience.

I do have 2 problems with it, however.
1) the game pieces are too similar to 2007's game. This is causing a lot of similar bots to be built among the more experienced team, as some already know what it takes to pick up a tube with a bot while others just copied what seemed to work in 2007. Now this is more of a hinder on the creativity that goes into building a robot, more than it effects actual gameplay.

2) the minibot just seems like a bad idea to me. Now I could be wrong, but I feel that minibots will start to look more and more alike as the season move on and that a team that gives an absolutely amzing tube placing spectacular could still lose to a fast minibots. I would feel much better about it if the scores where 20 15 10 5 as opposed to 30 20 15 10, but maybe i should just have some faith in the GDC and assume those are the perfect scores to make the elims all gut wrenching games

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

On the other hand, if all robots have roughly the same minibot, then tube scoring ability will decide the matches.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I somewhat agree with you in that there was a lot of very easy to come by inspiration for this game but I think that is becoming the norm for every game. Last year many teams were inspired by Robocup teams that have been figuring out how to kick soccer balls for years. We have to pick up and score balls or move a large ball in a huge number of games. FIRST recycles game elements and that is a good thing because teams get to improve on designs every year.

My team was very much inspired by 25's lift from 2007 but in no way would I say that trying to design and build ours was as easy as just building their design. Our team captain put in many hours CADing a lift that though inspired by 25's was designed for our game strategy and our construction techniques and abilities.

I see many teams doing similar designs but the differences are very noticeable, if you are looking for them.

This game is very different from 2007. It may use a similar game piece but the dynamics will be very different. Defense and power is much less important, where speed will be critical. Having a free shot during the hanging process and having much smaller end caps on the pegs, means it will be much easier to get a tube on a peg than it was in 07. I think a lot of teams figured that out and designed for it. I will say that there is no way that I would want to play Rack and Roll with our 2011 robot. It might be able to pick up the tubes but it was not designed for how Rack and Roll was played. I don't think that the best robots from 2007 will be the best robots in 2011, teams that designed for this year's game dynamics will have the most successful seasons.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

What will really change the game is the scoring pieces. I will eagerly recommend that our partners do not throw tubes out onto the field outside of our feeder lanes unless they opposing alliance can pick up off the ground. It makes their job so much easier since tubes are right next to their scoring rack.

Our team poked around the Behind the Design book from 2007 but weight started nagging us!

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Even if this proves to be true (which I don't think it will - the robots shown here on CD represent about 1% of all teams), is that necessarily a bad thing? The same argument has been made every year, and to the untrained eye was the most noticable last year.


This year it's all about implementation and execution. One of my students who had just seen the 118 video asked me if an arm like they've got, or a lift like we've got, is a better system. My answer was that it all depends on who can execute their design better.

This is one reason I love the fact that spectators are encouraged to visit the pits. Up close, the individual innovations and intricacies will be exciting - both from a mechanical and controls perspective.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I want to disagree. A significant portion of the engineering thought process is trying to figure out how to do something quicker, cheaper, lighter, stronger, .... - there are not to many opportunities to create something from nothing.

This game gave you the opportunity to look back and see what worked in 2007, what did not work in 2007, and then try to make the ones that did work, work better. With the added challenge of trying to fit a mini-bot deployment system in, you also had to do it with less space and less weight. That's what I see most engineers doing on a pretty regular basis.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

John, I think this is more a dynamic strategy game than any before it. Things are more constant than they are dynamic, and there are fewer drill-down tasks than ever before. The key change is that during every part of the teleop period, there can be 1 available robot that can switch roles instantaneously to adjust to the opponents' strategy regardless of what the current strategy is. I think elite bots that can do it all will REALLY shine here. That makes it fun; it also adds to the pressure on the coaches -- pressure to look forward to, imo.

(assuming the bolts don't fall off, the breakers don't trip and the motors don't catch on fire...)

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

The robots put up on CD look good but I'm more worried about the hundreds of teams who have said nothing and put nothing up at all. When I was at the Rochester Rally there were alot of teams not ready to compete and even more who did not show up. That's a bad sign.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Definitely a very level game, and I think a lot of it has to do with its similarity to 2007. Many teams improved upon the 2007 versions of themselves, while intelligent younger teams looked to 2007 videos and information (behind the design) to develop a robot based on some knowledge.

The way I see it playing out is the early weeks will come down to minibots. Alliances which have 2 very quick and effective minibots will be VERY difficult to take down. As the weeks go on and teams emulate succesful minibots and also figure out how to make their deployments faster/more reliable, we will see a slight shift in focus to tube scoring.

The key difference for me between 2007 and now is not scoring tubes as quickly as you can (I mean it is, but it's not just a grab and place fest). It's ensuring each tube you score is in a position to score the maximum amount of points. We saw instances in the scrimmage (small sample size warning) where teams scored a significant amount more tubes than their opponents, but did it on a different row (ie: middle and bottom as opposed to top). The scores would be close, but teams who concentrated on the top row only and took the extra time to ensure the scores were solid, tended to come out on top.

I imagine week 1 will be similar in strategy to this. Quality tubes winning out over quantity of tubes, and minibots ruling all.

-Brando

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

...says an engineer who is ineligible to drive the robot. :D

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I don't blame the super powerhouse teams for preferring a more difficult game like Breakaway - that was a really cool game that showed how organized and talented the really good teams are. But it's nice to have a year where more teams can field a robot that can do each element of the game pretty well. I'm happy that the difficulty of the game can vary somewhat from year to year.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

A possible unfortunate consequence of the access to such designs from 2007 is that many teams may see ideas from Behind the Design and try to implement similar designs when they may not have the same resources that some of these award winning teams had. It may result in many teams trying to go beyond their means of production and not having a working robot come competition. That being said, we will still see many more top tier robots this year do to the availability of these designs. It will be a contest to see who can build it faster, better, easier and who puts in the time to practice, compete, and scout the right way during the competition season.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

I agree with this.
Like any other previous years, there are hundreds of teams who are not done yet at this point every season, and given the fact that minibots can be brought to the event, you have two robots to worry about instead of one. Our HI scrimmage and the fact that many teams didnt show up was a great indication of it in our own State, not that I was surprised.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

Organized? Yes we are. Powerhouse? NO.
Even thought we had a great year last year, I would never ask to be in the same situation again as Breakaway was THE worst build season we ever had. That was a tough game to be able to do everything and "try" to do it well.

Personally, I like the game being similar to 2007. There are still other elements to this game that calls for great strategies, a great human player, great driving (backwards again to score), and TWO robots.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

There are a lot of good looking robots on Chief Delphi... but people tend to forget what gets on chief Delphi are about 50 robots out of the top 300 teams or so. When you uncrate/unbag your robot at regional and have minor installations remaining (like our lift) or none at all; and you see teams scrambling to get something, moving or not, on the field, then you remember. The week one regionals can sometimes have 3-4 moving/present robots in a match, and only one or two of them can actually be a factor.

Good looking bots get online every year. Small samples will yield skewed results.

Re: A lot of good loking robots
 

The tremendous lack of face time with the robot will hurt teams alot. If you don't have time to practice driving and tube handling and have to learn on the fly then you are going to be WAY BEHIND the teams that have practice bots who get this game down to a science.