Musings on Design Inspiration
 

So... I've seen a few discussions "boil over" recently concerning teams building robots inspired by other robots. I wanted to start a thread dedicated to this topic.

I put my musings on design inspiration here:
http://blog.iamjvn.com/2011/03/design-inspiration.html

I hope others will take the time to digest their feelings on this sort of thing, reflect, and share them with the community.

More food for thought...
-John

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I agree 120%, yes i can honestly say we took some of their minibot ideas example wheel placement, and materials of them but I hate when teams copies the whole minibot...it's annoying

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I know this isn't church, but I feel the need to say AMEN. That is all.
~EJ

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I like you distinguishing between inspiration and just copying. In minibots the same you should be done like the robots regarding inspiration, be inspired by a design another team did but make it your own as well.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

One reason, that John touched on but can be expanded, is that it is now so much easier to find information about other robots. Sure, there was internet 10 or 15 years ago, but how long would it have taken you do download just one picture of one robot? Now we have robot matches being posted to YouTube before the robots synch up for the next match.

The same problems that teachers and professors have with plagerism - it's just so easy to find a source that can be copied - applies to robot design as well. Once a design is out there, it can circulate freely.

I think the copied teams have nothing to worry about nor complain about. But John's points about whether you learn from copying are very valid concerns. Before you use someone else's design, ask yourself if the team will be getting as much inspiration from winning with a good robot as you would with sometimes winning with your own design.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

This happens every year, mini-bot or not (think 121's roller claw in 2008, or the "pincher" in 2010). It just happens to be extraordinarily easy to copy a mini-bot, owing to a combination of rules, materials, and the fact that the emerging "best" solution is ridiculously simple.

Designs get copied. Every year. Especially this year. But unless you start an "FRC Patent Office", I'm not sure what can be done about it. And in the end, I think that the net gain (many students being inspired by implementing, thereby learning from, what others have perfected) more than offsets the net loss (that some short-sighted teams will end up short changing students from the full engineering design process).

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I will say that I agree with you on most of your post. However I will say that copying or being inspired by minibots can prove to be a great learning experience for students.

At Alamo this year the DiscoBots had several students that were very dissatisfied with the MiniBot that the team had put together. It was a 3 second minibot but they wanted to be faster. We had plans to build a faster minibot and had done some of the numbers but hadn't had the time to do it. While at Alamo several students took it upon themselves to go to the teams that had faster minibots than us and ask them how they did it. (I know the list included 118, 148, and 1429; there may be more I wasn't involved in it). The kids set out on a task to have it built by the end of the regional, they worked through Thursday, Friday and Saturday not stopping for lunch to build an entirely new minibot and modify our deployment mechanism to not only launch the new one but to remain compatible with our old much larger minibot. Thanks to the machine shop at the event for helping them with a lot of the fabrication. They were franticly testing it till the last minute we had to go on the field for what would be our last elimination match (they brought our test pole to the queuing line). It was an amazing act of dedication to the cause. In the end the minibot did not win us Alamo (as you know JVN).

However, it was crucial to our Finalist performance at Lone Star. We were in a situation were we had to beat the 624 minibot up the pole to win the match and they had a about a 6 ft head start on us by the time ours started to climb. The new minibot was able to win the race by a split second and we won the 2nd semi-final by 8 points. We went on to win the 3rd match and head into the finals.

The students involved had worked through the season to build a really good minibot but they still wanted to improve, they learned from others and went about the task. I have very rarely seen teams that copy anything from another robot detail for detail. They build from pictures and adapt ideas and through that process develop a better understanding of the problem.

There have been many examples of design features have been adapted by many teams during the build season. Traction control in 2009 comes to mind. This is the first year where it has been a very crucial part of the game that directly earns a great deal of points.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

From what I've seen in FIRST, teams that copy generally always learn something from it, and if they don't, the copy they produce is of much lower quality than the original. In FTC in 2008, 546 made a neat mechanism that worked pretty well, for the most part. We decided to post it online, and much to our surprise, we began seeing "copies" pop up all over the place. I can't say how many of them were developed before hand, but I did notice that many teams took the design to the next level, and the majority of them worked quite well. I guess one issue with copying is that there's no way to know how much work the teams actually put into refining the design, versus just tinkering with it until it happens to work right. I'll take a stab and say it's generally the former. I know 842's minibot was influenced by 118's, but I also know how much time, effort, and engineering went into making it work. The design isn't exactly something you could copy in 30 minutes and expect to work consistently.

In general, I believe copying in FIRST is, at heart, reverse-engineering.

EDIT: I forgot to ask, has anyone ever noticed a team copy a design explicitly without learning something? I guess my major gripe with copying is when teams reap the rewards for the design without any consideration of the team that "inspired" them.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Some things to think about...

I'm curious about the relationship between the coopertition based encouragement to loan a mini-bot (the ultimate in 'copying') vs. copying a design. In the former, the 'copy' is (perhaps) initiated by the designer, whereas in the latter the copy is initiated by the recipient.

If a team came to you and asked to borrow a minibot (and you had extras to share) would you turn them down? If they asked to borrow the design, would you turn them down?

I'd agree however that copying a design without attributing the design to the originating team (who may have stolen it from a third team?) is not very GP.

Would you loan a minibot to a team on an alliance competing against you? During Qualifications? During Eliminations?

If you loaned a very good minibot during qualifications for indefinite use during the weekend, and then found yourself competing against that same team Saturday afternoon, would you 'take it back' ?

John Vriezen
Team 2530, "Inconceivable"
Mentor, Drive Coach, Inspector

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

When team 20 arrived at nationals in 2009, we found a team that had copied our robot entirely. We thought it was funny, but I doubt the students on that team learned much from it.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I have a slightly different take on the "learning" aspect of this. Let's say a group of students worked on their minibot for the entire build season, tried lots of different design options, did their best, but only produced a rather average minibot.

Somewhere in their thought process something was missing - they just couldn't see the better solution for whatever reason. They understand the problem and the parameters, but the key to breaking through with a truly top notch design has escaped them.

As soon as they see the exceptional minibot made by another team they can study it, understand why it works, they can go back through their build season and figure out what in their thought process caused them to miss the obvious, elegant solution. If they build it, they can see firsthand how it works and begin to understand the tradeoffs within that design. In this respect, there is learning benefit to "copying" a great design.

The "competion" side of things is another matter - the minibot is so easy to copy that any team that wants a fast minibot can make one easily. This may make the outcome of many matches rather random - assuming teams can make a successful deploy mechanism. The deploy may still be the larger challenge this year.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

John, imagine a scenario:

You're President of a business you started years ago. You've worked months on a proposal in competition with other companies for a complex job. You show up to ask questions about submissions in a public forum where (through logical interpretations of even the cleverest wordsmithing) you've discerned some details of your competitors' submissions. However, all it revealed was that your approach to the problem was completely inadequate. What do you do?

Given the chance for improvements, I doubt you'd stay the course. After all, the morale of your employees and reputation of your company is at stake. Sure, I would be quite offended if I had a novel [insert FRC design here] mechanism that was cloned in the same season by a team I may later face; yet being a mentor you too can learn a significant lesson from this.

The rest of this is an anecdote that's merely here to say that I think there's a fine line between believing a team 'simply created a clone' versus the team 'changing course in some core aspects of the design'. When I say "you" I mean the generalized team who has a 1.5s minibot using DD shafts that weighs next to nothing.

Do you expect credit for the entire minibot, certain aspects of the minibot, what? I wasn't 'inspired' by any of the minibots seen here on CD or in web casts; I was simply proven to have made a wrong decision along the way. We visited the idea of direct-drive minibots briefly early in the season, yet shied away from it because we had to make a decision (due to scheduling and snow) before we were able to test all options. The test would have been to see whether or not the drive shaft could have made it through constant shocks while being only cantilevered. So instead we went with a more conservative, modified-gearbox design. It's heavier overall (4.0 lbs) yet has many aspects that are similar to minibots seen in videos and even the "one-day minibot" posted on CD.

If anything, these latest designs will have us revisit the minibot design after DC should we make it to Championships in order to iterate through the direct-drive options. But to say we "cloned the powerhouse teams" would be to completely discredit us, and everything we figured out on our own other than direct-drive shafts and their placement. These things include magnet placement, center of gravity placement, secure attachment to the deployment mechanisms for match play, quick releasing for deployment, etc. This specific anecdote is almost as bad as someone saying a powerhouse team is "mostly mentor built" -- it's simply not factual to paint such a broad stroke.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

The question of how Coopertition plays into all this is an interesting one. Copying is one thing, but in borrowing a minibot you don't even get the experience of building it, and an even lesser admiration. However, FRC is encouraging this behaviour. Perhaps when one team had no minibot at all, this is the slightest bit understandable, but in cases I've seen, a borrowed minibot has simply replaced another, and a team has undermined its own work to seek greater success.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I think this is a fantastic point. Midseason redesign is nothing new to this competition. Since 1995 (the first time there was a regional and championship competition in a season) teams have made adjustments, often based off of what they see at a regional, in order to climb back into the race for the second chance at winning. Minibots make it much easier to copy a design and incorporate its strategy at a future competition, but I would hazard a guess that just about every team who does it has went through the painstaking learning process the first time around. They will continue to learn the lesson by building the clone and seeing what they did wrong the first time around. To be honest, I completely expect to see tons of 1.5 minibot clones at championships, and I say thank god! This game was too heavily weighted towards the minibot race from the get-go. From the standpoint of a spectator, I like the prospect of seeing more speedy minibots to make the races more interesting. The more minibots that go up the towers, the more the competition is geared towards skill in autonomous and basic scoring. With so many clones, I would imagine the focus on the minibot race will shift more towards deployment...an aspect which I think most people will say the true challenge lies in that portion of the game.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I'd be careful here, don't be quick to judge. I walked into a meeting one day and saw my team was testing a component that looked almost exactly like one I had seen in a youtube video. When I mentioned it, I got confused looks from everybody. They hadn't seen it and had developed the same component independently without knowing it had already been done. Just because it looks copied, doesn't mean that it is.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

John,

I have to say that I disagree with you on this one. I appreciate your quest for "justice" as you called it, but I think your first part of your post contradicted and proved the second part wrong. You even said that the relatively new found openness and transparency has benefited the ENTIRE FRC community and has bumped up the level of competition several notches.

Now as far as this being unfair, I disagree. That's just life. Take the iphone for example. When it first came out it was absolutely revolutionary, but over time competitors came onto the market and now there are many Android powered phones that are (in my opinion) superior to the iphone.

The minibot is to FRC teams as the iphone is to Apple. It's true that teams like 148 put hours upon hours in R&D with their minibots, and yes it's true that other teams (COMETS Robotics included) are seriously looking at copying successful minibot designs, but it's also true that this "unfairness" makes this season an even more realistic engineering challenge.

If teams wanted to hide their minibots, then by all means do so! Have it covered up, put opaque shielding around it, and make sure no one sees it inbetween matches! Just don't have it in plain sight and expect to have people not be inspired by it (or copy it). To my, that's what's unfair.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

In our team's case, we had an average minibot, a great deployment and our alliance captains team decided to replace our average minibot with their faster minibot during Saturday lunch time-- the net result is that our minibot was able to beat theirs up the pole (due to deployment differences -- actually our average one beat theirs as well, when we had to revert back to it later in elims) I didn't see that as undermining our own work, because at that point, we were pursuing the best opportunity to win the competition (which we ALMOST did.)

John Vriezen
Team 2530 "Inconceivable"
Mentor, Drive Coach, Inspector

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Sorry John,

I think I have to agree with Grant on this one. When "copying" designs I think it is up to mentors to teach kids why something is being made. And to be honest, with something like the minibots this year, there's many teams who worked their way down to the "barebones" style minibot, as I like to call it, on their own. 1647 is one example of such case (only example I have because I worked with them as they iterated their minibot design). Many teams also willingly helped others such as Aren of 1625 and Dustin from 816.

I guess what I just want to add in is for everyone to not go ahead and assume that if a team's minibot resembles the basic designs of another that it is a copy. Minibots when optimized are pretty easy to "steal from the best" but IMHO very hard to fulfil the "invent the rest" part of the equation.

+$0.02

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Hmmmm.

A Director of Product Development for a major Robotics vendor admits he is being intentionally sarcastic and judgmental about some customers that he perceives are not following the rules the WAY he thinks they should be, not how the rules are actually written by FIRST.

He feels wronged.

I'd recommend swallowing some of that pride and looking at the big picture and get with the 21th century.

Open source is the FASTEST way to bootstrao use of technology and train legions to use technology. Does your team use any software that was provided free to you?

CD has seemingly become a place for a gripe session for all the powerhouse teams to tell everyone how unfair the world is and how we need to make FIRST more about making sure the powerhouses get every bit of accolades they feel entitled to.

If you haven't actually been in deep and thoughtful communication with any of the teams that you think is copying without the students learning about engineering, then your musing are NO better than the novice teams that think mentors do all the work on the powerhouses. Actually it's worse because with your resources, you should know better.

There is no place in FIRST for musing about negative perceptions that come from ignorance.- Not by powerhouses nor by novice teams.

Lighten up people.

If you think you know enough to feel justified being intentionally sarcastic to people that volunteer for FIRST (based on what you IMAGINE is going on for those people), it's time for you to leave your bad attitude at the door and start meditating on what the real purpose of FIRST is.

Maybe as you get older, you will recognize such things.

In the heat of the moment, I can be sarcastic myself but always on reflection, I always figure out I could have handled it a better way.

FIRST is not first about making sure powerhouses do not feel jilted.
FIRST is first about bootstrapping high schools across the whole world to encourage use STEM through the use of a fun tool: the competition.

There is no doubt in my mind that fabricating copies is typically a means of inspiration. It is typically a means of bootstrapping good engineering information. I think too many teams work too much on their own, spending huge amounts of time, without checks along the way. Some don't use physics and math, some don't have basic fabrication skills, some don't 'have anyone that knows the ins and out of FRC robots nor FRC competitions.

If you think you see a team that is missing one or more of the pieces, instead of being sarcastic and judgemental, the right response is to meekly offer help. It might take years- but I think that is what FIRST is supposed to be about. Now I might be wrong, this is only my 3rd year at FIRST but over half a century at life.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Back in the first week of the build season (on 11 Jan) I posted this in response to Team Update 1:

If there is anyone/thing to "blame" for all the cloned Minibots, it's the ultra-strict Minibot rules. After TU1, it was quite obvious what the most optimal solution would be, and that was a Minibot which eliminated as much mass and friction as possible. The more one worked at reducing weight (eliminate Tetrix structural parts and wheels) and reducing friction (good bye [several stages] of Tetrix gearbox), the more all designed converged to tiny, magnet-based, direct-driver screamers.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Wait, what? Where did you get this as a "JVN griping that he didn't get enough awards"? I read it and it said that he views doing the work as an admirable trait and that he doesn't think that blind copying without any interpretation is equally as admirable. He does mention that teams (not his specifically) who put in the work to develop effective solutions should be rewarded by winning. I fail to understand how that is saying that "powerhouses" should get more awards.

Besides, the teams the company works with have won 5 different regionals... already... I hear one of them just won a district last weekend too. Between them they have more regional victories, more Einstein appearances, more technical awards than any other grouping of 5 teams you can make up... one of them is a Hall of Fame team and one of them (the one John works with) is a Legacy team. These are all teams who are already respected, why would he complain they aren't getting what they are entitled to?

Oh Wait, they aren't. These are veteran teams who have been dumped on, booed, and, in at least one situation I am aware of, had their students harassed online (I am repulsed when I read what was said to that student). So, if they want to complain a little bit that they are being treated like crap I think we should sit back and at least evaluate whether they are right.

But, none of this is at all relevant to John's point of saying that he feels that teams copying minibots are missing out. Heck, read the last section.
Sounds to me like he is saying that copying is ok so long as you don't stop there. Sounds an awful lot like exactly what you are talking about to me.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

You and I read different things about what John said.

John said
"I don't like it when someone benefits from someone else's hard work.
This is related to my personal vision on "justice" and applies to all aspects of my life. I feel like if one team put in a lot of effort for an advantage, another team shouldn't be able to get this same advantage without working for it. It isn't FAIR, in my worldview. The team that put in the work should be able to reap the benefits. It would be very demoralizing if a team put in a lot of effort to come up with an advantage, then lost to another team who just copied them without any effort. But of course... life isn't fair, so maybe I should just suck it up and deal with this one."



Please explain how this description of "fairness" is not about accolades.

Racial/Ethnic/Gender slurs have no place in FIRST.
The Rules of FIRST identify guidelines on gracious professionalism.
It is deplorable that one team was booed. Does it deserve more postings on CD as compared to each and every team that died out in their first year or two? Where are the postings about them? The issue is" what is it that the people of FIRST should be focused on and talking about.

Sounds to me that he feels he might be entitled to sarcastically refer to some FIRST volunteers as leeches if they don't submit to his view of what a good approach to teaching students about STEM is. Maybe it is just a language problem: maybe "Don't be a leach" is not a judgmental put down in the communication circles John and you run in.

In the real world, many engineers are initially given test and fabrication jobs before they understand enough to do good R&D. There is a progression: working too much on your own without understanding the state of the art in your field is a BAD approach to engineering: because it is perceived as wasting too much time because it does not make use of valuable information.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Interesting insight.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I manage to get a full and complete copy of your robot design, down to the tolerances. How doesn't really matter right now. I build that design, without doing any improvements or design work of my own.

Now I beat you in a match (just to make it more fun, it's FM3 at a regional). I didn't do any design work; I just used the design you published. I don't give you any credit. I simply took your design, whether you liked it or not.

How do you feel after that happens? How is that fair? You do all the work, and I get the win.

Let's try another tack. I see your design somehow (let's say a public demo, or maybe by the channel that I used in the previous example). I spot something you missed, let's say a weakness. I build a robot that is very similar in design, but has some differences that eliminate that weakness.

Now, I beat you in the same match. I've still taken your design, but I've improved it, capitalized on the weakness I spotted, done the engineering work.

How do you feel about it now? I did some re-evaluation of some of your design decisions, and I built your robot, only better. I get the win. Not only that, but at some point I've shared the weakness with you so you can counter it.

It's not about accolades. It's about doing the work and having the result turn out such that those that don't do the work don't win. It's like cheating on a test--those that do the work do well; those that copy the work do almost as well (missed a couple items maybe)--but in the long run, those that do the work actually do better because those that copied don't know what they're doing.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

We try to get the general design concept and ideas that we prototype out in the world early on in the season (youtube and CD and our own web page photo gallery and forum), we've done this since 2008. We have not seen any downside to it. The best part is that others are quick to point out problems they see, based on their experiences--we have many many man-years of experience reviewing our design for free! And if we happen inspire another team that's struggling to figure out how to do something, is that a bad thing?

We didn't publish any minibot info mainly because I wasn't working on it. Although we did post pics of our deployment mechanism when we finally got it figured out and built.

Our team is not in a position that we have to worry about competitive advantage. We are in a position where we can help other teams by showing them one way to solve some of the challenges they face. There are a lot of teams that can use all the help they can get...not for competitive advantage, but just to build a working robot. We want to help them.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Being a mentor on a team that has benefitted to the highest level (World Championships) from gaining inspiration from other teams designs in the same season (see below), it would be hypocritical of me to say that it is completely wrong to do.

Inspired design changes:
2009 - Teams like 148, 1114, and 254 released videos of their robots dumping huge amounts of balls. 111 and 1625 dominated the Midwest Regional with "power dumpers". We were struggling with how to funnel balls out of our robot. Based what we saw from other teams, we completely re-designed and rebuilt our robot during our 6 hr build window before our first competition.

2010 - 148 and 217 release videos that show them grabbing balls, spinning, and kicking them. We had just learned that our top roller only "grabber" was not functioning as well as we had planned. From the videos we could see how they were doing it, and added a lower bar to "pinch" the ball when we grabbed it.

2011 - 118 and 148 release videos of their minibots using direct drive motors. Our minibot team was struggling to get the reliability of their modified gearbox designed minibots figured out. They had already gone through (12) different iterations of designs to this point. We were already discussing building a direct drive minibot, but wanted a fall back version that functioned before we started another design. When that design proved to not be reliable, our mentors and students working on the HOSTBOT took over and designed a direct drive minibot similar to what was seen from 118. Technically what 118 provided was an inspirational concept. It took 2 iterations to get it to go up the pole without flipping off, another iteration to make it deployable, and now one more to optimize it for speed.

In these cases did we learn as we modified and adapted our designs to compete with teams at the highest level? Yes!

Our students learned that sometimes there is a better more elegant solution available. That they should always strive for continuous improvement. That their engineers do make mistakes, but work to find a better solution that actually works.

Our engineering mentors learned that our design process is not perfect (far from it). That we can learn from prototyping designs, testing, and iterating too functional solutions.

In all of these cases, I don't think we copied anyones design without doing any engineering of our own. Even the ball magnet required us to fully understand what and how 148/217 was doing it, before we could optimize our design and make it work.

There are at least 5 versions this year of the 4 bar "push link" arm design we used in 2007. In all the cases where we were acknowledged as inspiration for the design, it makes my day. Just knowing that other teams are looking at parts of robots that I helped design is exciting. Especially when it is teams that I really respect.

There is at least one copy of our current version of a minibot. I don't have an issue with them using the design, but I do wish the credit for the features that make this minibot design successful (the clamps) was given to the team that came up with the design.

I hope we have done a good job giving credit to the teams that have inspired us, in a proper time frame. Would we have come to these solutions on our own, probably, was it a huge time saver to see what actually works, then optimize it for our design....Definitely!

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Engineering is all about collaboration. No one designs bridges by themselves, no one has tried to redesign the missile, and naval carriers are all rather iterative.

The minibot, while it can be seen a nuisance in Logomotion, practically negating the tititular objective of making logos, is the true manifestation of engineering collaboration. Also, they seem to be hard to copy unknowingly, considering they are so small.

My team developed, in my somewhat objective-but-let's-be-honest-I'm-biased opinion, the greatest deployment system ever. However, all of our minibots failed to launch. At Chesapeake, the students from 88, 340, and 768 (borrowing a 340 minibot) offered to load a second minibot on our robot in collaborative matches to gain points in exchange for showing us how their design worked.

Though I know this is not what is commonly happening, this is perfect, symbiotic collaboration. I scratch your back, you scratch mine mindset. Now our team has put into construction a great minibot that we know will be successful at the VA regional. (barring peg entanglement)

***
I think this would be a good time to point out that FRC has evolved to contain different restrictions and allowances, but it has also created stratification of teams into "haves" and "have-nots." Teams that make it by on 7-10k/year don't have the opportunities to build multiple designs, practice bots, 1:1 scale fields, and the like. While teams that operate on this shoestring budget can be caught degrading the "haves" of FIRST, a lot of teams just try to win something, so they can show it to a prospective sponsor, so they can trully build a team.

Not everyone can be sponsored by IFI, but maybe they can learn from the teams that do and become better because of it.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

You have such a way of making me smile. :)

This falls into the sustainability reality. Regions and areas that are underdeveloped or in process of development - need teams that have the priorities that your team does. Not everyone understands or 'gets' that. We've been called a 'mentor team' by some of the teams in our area. I like that term. It says a lot in 2 words and your team would be considered a 'mentor team', if I understand these teams correctly.

It is always wise to recognize the source of inspiration,whether it be a robot design, a quote, a spirit idea that is awesome, a website design, a cool safety button, a business plan that is well done, a team philosophy/practice that you have learned about. It is always good to give credit where credit is due. In robotics competitions and in the real world.

It is also true that this game is just made to continually evolve throughout the weeks of competition season. Strategy, minibots, game play, alliance strengths and weaknesses - it's a fun game that hasn't topped out yet. And it is good practice to recognize the changes and who the teams are that are bringing the changes about and how or why. Document them/credit them in your team meetings and discussions and on your team websites and in chat discussions. Get used to acknowledging and documenting design ideas/inspiration/development and changes.

Jane

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

It is only natural to be unhappy when the right people don't get the proper credit for their work, but that's just how it goes, unfortunately. Can you name the chemist that developed the original version of the drug that you are taking in its generic form? We have to let our own historians figure out where the credit belongs.

I also wouldn't worry too much about students missing out on the design process because they "copied' something. They will just learn different lessons.

We gave away our first-generation minibot design to anybody that asked. Nobody who built one made it exactly the same way, and most are better than our original. They all learned along the way. We lent one out to a few teams at our competitions and one team will it take to their next competition. They figured out how to deploy it and they learned along the way. It will probably break at some point and then they will have to learn even more. If they hadn't gotten their hands on a "finished" product, their learning path would have been different or just skipped altogether.

We will press on with our next generation that borrows from stuff we saw last weekend (like from 67 and 2054), as well as stuff posted on CD (to the chagrine of many). Nothing we hadn't discussed before, but now we know that the concepts actually work so we will build versions of each and learn along the way (probably more than we want to). 67 and 2054, etc., will come up with someting better, and they will learn more along the way. That's the cool thing about minibots - they are so simple that every competition can be a whole new iteration of the design process. I don't expect many of the best minibots that ran last weekend to be around by St. Louis, unless their owners fall into the "good enough is the enemy of great" trap.

Some of our students (and probably yours) aren't particularly interested in the design process and won't be very involved. They won't learn as much as the ones who can't keep their hands out off the stuff.

I'm not sure there is much of a relationship between how much you beg, borrow, or "steal" ideas from others and what you learn. There is no free lunch and you won't be successful with what you have unless you learn something along the way.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Why do you think its worth representing a behavior that you don't know whether it happens in FRC or not?
Is using such a representation any better than using the argument there could exist teams where only mentors touch the robot and students don't do any work?

The most likely place that a "clone" could occur would be a fledgling team that starts with a clone of some portion (if not all) of a sponsoring team's design. The fledging team typically learns a lot when they use a clone.
Just assembling a competitive bot and testing it the first year is a steep learning curve for many teams. But they don't end up in as many inefficient dead ends. If that fledgling team is sponsored by a powerhouse: is it appropriate to call them leeches? I don't think so, they are learning a lot. And much more efficiently than fledgling teams that try to do everything on their own without a good plan and without good engineering guidance.
Is the hard and inefficient way the best way to learn?

There are no rules in FIRST to prevent such a cloning approach.

So I think you are more likely concerned about copying without permission as opposed to copying with permission.

Or are you disgruntled by teams that are open source with good designs that others choose that they are only capable of copying in the first year?

I think it would be ludicrous to expect a team to want to compete year to year in FRC only to copy and never plan to do any engineering of their own.

Are you really worried that those teams exist and we should be concerned about them?

FIRST defines what cheating is- reusing someone else's design is not cheating according to the rules. It may be a patent violation if it is done without permission- but FIRST encourages everyone to share- but it also does not disparage teams for trying to keep secret sauce recipes.

The sequence of regional matches is INTENTIONALLY an iterative process in the redesign of robot mechanisms. The goal is not the most competitive robot after 6 weeks, but the most competitive robots in the championship. The world does not stand still for any team.

How many powerhouses redesigned their minibots AFTER seeing a direct drive minibot?

How many ended up with a minibot or minibot deployer design that looked very similar to a design they saw during the build season?

Is ending up with such a minibot design cheating if the team already designed a real slick LOGO lifter?

Is copying another human player's throwing technique without permission considered cheating?

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I've been looking for somewhere to drop an essay and this thread was close.

The whole minibot thing has soured this year a little for me. My worst experience in six years or FIRST was at our first regional where we had brought 2 essentially identical minibots with us (one for us and a backup because our design is a little fragile). We decided before the regional that as long as we didn’t break our primary we would be willing to lend our backup to other teams until eliminations when we hoped to attach it to an alliance partner.

We lent the backup to two different teams at the competition and I couldn’t have more polar opinions of them.

The first was a team who due to geographical inconvenience (aka borders) weren’t able to build a minibot but had a solid looking deployment system with hopes someone would lend them a minibot. We loaned them our backup and “mini bot specialist” for the better part of the second day and third morning. Unfortunately they never were able to successfully deploy it on the field but after the regional they came to our pit and gave our student a box of chocolates as a token of appreciation. That team was a class act.

The second team saw us practice deploying our minibot on the practice field and one of their mentors came over to our student and asked about our minibot. After the student explained the mentor then asked something along the lines of “How much would you sell it to me for?”* The student, who appeared a little distraught, then came over to me and explained what happened. I brushed it off as a failed attempt at a joke and that maybe they would be interested in attempting to deploy our minibot since they were interested. He did. When he came back he said “I left the minibot with them to see if they could make it work and when I came back they were measuring the shafts with a caliper. Then when I told them the other team wanted to try deploying it again the mentor offered to buy it again.”* I told the student not to work with that team anymore and if the mentor asks again, tell him that it will cost him $8000 (approximately the cost for us to get to St Louis). To my knowledge he wasn’t asked again. I would still like to think it has a joke but I have serious doubts.

*Second hand from the student involved.

My opinion with the direct copying thing is that I don’t care for it but it isn't my greatest concern. I’ve decided that in general the team that copies doesn’t come close to being as effective as the “original”. If they do, it is because the original is not trying to continually improve their design, which is just as bad. (As Arthur stated, with the restrictions on minibots this year there is a very reachable performance ceiling and the issue is worse than normal.)

My thoughts on this particular event are:
- Bothered that the student was put in this situation
- Humored that I know they will have design issues
- Not really an issue competitively for us

- We won’t compete against them again
- If we had we’ve since improved our overall design and deployment and still will be faster anyways

-I hope their next event is webcasted. I want to know if it works after all:D

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Boomergeek, I was taking the "copying" to an extreme. As in, I get copies of all your design drawings and all that sort of thing, and build an identical robot, without your permission/knowledge. Building twins without building twins, if you will.

BTW, John was not calling copiers leeches. He was calling copiers who do not learn from the experience of copying/improving/iterating and then pass that knowledge on leeches. There is a difference.

I don't exactly care about whether the copying is with or without permission in FRC--but there should really be some learning to go with it, and some modification based on that learning.

My problem is not with seeing a design and adapting it to fit a current design that someone already has (you still have to do the engineering). My problem is with someone seeing a design and making an exact copy, and not learning why it works the way it works, or what the physics behind it say.

Derive and iterate, instead of copy, is the way to learn. (Unless, of course, you're doing collaboration--which simply means that you're doing a couple extra copies of one particular design, with full participation in the designing by both teams. That brings its own set of problems.)

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Hi Everyone,
I posted my thought process on this, but I don't think there is anything in my writings as a whole to agree or disagree with. There are literally contradictions in my writings just like there are contradictions in my feelings on the matter.

I don't like seeing "I agree with John" or "I disagree with John" because... I don't know HOW I feel. You'll note that 148 is one of the biggest posters of our designs, and I've been one of the biggest proponents for "raising the level of competition" by sharing what we do. So I hope if anything you'll let our actions speak...

However, I'm curious what others think and feel. I dislike absolutes. I know there are others out there like me who are conflicted about certain aspects of this, and I would love to see them put these feelings into words, to hopefully help me put my feelings into better perspective.

Please continue the discussion!
-John

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

What I disagreed with is calling it 'copying' because I don't see minibot similarity the same as the extreme EricH described (because let's be honest, that extreme really isn't even possible).

I really really like how Art put it though, a lot of people reached the optimization ceiling. I like to give people with clones the benefit of the doubt though and hope that they did take the time out to analyze a design and make it better (if possible), but that might just be me.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

As the design lead for the elevator system and the roller claw system on our robot this year, I figured I'd put in my two cents. Especially since both systems are very heavily "inspired" by other past (and even current) designs.

As I posted in the photo this year, our elevator system is very heavily inspired by 254/968 in 2007. I wouldn't call it a clone by any means, but the fact remains that the initial round of design still belongs to them.

That said, I do think that a lot of valuable design work and process was exposed to myself and our students when designing the system. A lot of the design depended on our team's resources, which are different than 254/968's. We can't exactly machine pulley mounts from aluminum billets on this team. We also made sure that the design was updated to suit this year's game.

When we design iterations on other's systems, I actually prefer not to look at their CAD. This is personal preference, but I feel like it's pretty easy to fall into the trap of designing for the wrong goals and the wrong game that way.

Our roller claw this year was designed and fabricated between ship and our competition last weekend. And yeah, I'll admit that certain inspirations are taken from designs for this year's game. For example, we implemented our own spin on 148's backstop idea, and it worked brilliantly in competition.

Doing a design post-ship wasn't exactly easy though. The way the elevator was set up made it pretty difficult to integrate the two systems together. It's still a valuable experience for the entire design team to work through a systems integration problem like the one we had with our claw. Our claw wasn't a direct copy of anybody's though, and I'm proud to say that.

Now that we have competed for the first time this year, there are a few things that we've learned about our design as a team. If we had just carbon copied another design, the learning process would become completely different. This way, we learn from our own mistakes, not from other's.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Hi boomergeek,
Mea Culpa. I'm human. I'm flawed (deeply). I make many mistakes. I have feelings that I have trouble reconciling with the way I really FEEL on the whole.

My intent with many of my writings has been to showcase the "whole" JVN, my thought processes, my feelings, my flaws in the interest of stimulating discussion.

I dislike your comments regarding the "whole" which target specific pieces of my writings (out of context). Yes, the bad parts of me are bad. My negative feelings are negative. I would have hoped people would read the entire post and put it in the context of the post as a whole and in the context of my actions before judging me. I will work better to communicate my intent in the future, or just skip the bad stuff.

I also don't appreciate your "grow up kid" attitude (my words, not yours). This isn't my first rodeo. I'm sure when I'm older I will be wiser, but that doesn't mean my thoughts aren't valid today.

Yes, I'm Director of Product Development for VEX Robotics.
Yes, many of the people on this forum are my customers. Yes, you're correct, I should never as an official of VEX Robotics speak negatively about any of my customers. However... I thought I was wearing my Robowrangler hat today. :) I thought I was speaking as a participant of the robotics community, as a former student, and active mentor. I guess there isn't a good way for me to leave my title at the door and still participate here.

You've called me out on it twice now for this, and I've got to say that you're the first person who has commented on it. There was a long period of time I didn't post on these forums for specifically this reason. There are many others who don't post for this reason. I always hope that this is a place where we can all wear our "team hats" and discuss the issues that matter to us. I hope that perhaps others in similar situations would don their team hats and come back here in the interest of common discourse. Perhaps that hope is naive.

Ohh... I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this discussion. I always love seeing other viewpoints. However in my opinion your tone leaves something to be desired (perhaps you meant it in response to my "tone", but I re-read my post and can't figure out what part of it justified this response).

-John

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Ok I am going to jump in on this and state that I neither disagree or agree with what JVN has posted. Points have been made that support both sides. As mentioned by others, this has happened in the past couple of years. Making adjustments to the robot between competitions is within the rules, but at the same time what are students gaining? However, lets think of the real world for just a moment.

Aren't patents being infringed upon every day? Whether or not it is right, this is what is happening in the world. "Companies" are making money "copying" the successes of others. Companies fiercely defend their products, but does that stop the copying? I don't believe it does. This is the type of competition that many companies are facing today and it is a fact that many have to deal with. Obviously our rules don't apply abroad and it is much tougher to deal with. How do the "origin" companies survive? They continue to stay ahead of the curve with their innovative designs. The results? Other companies follow their lead and build upon the design, or at least try to.

Do FIRST teams go back to a method of secrecy? I don't believe that is in the best interest of all teams, but at the same time "copying" continues to go on. I am in the same place as JVN, I don't know how I feel about the copying, but I believe this is a reality that many of us need to face. Copying has and is happening in FRC and I believe that each team will react to it differently.

Obviously we want all teams to succeed, but to what extent do we balance reality with the educational opportunities students gain from this program? Unfortunately I don't have the answer, but I hope as a community we will be able to come to an understanding.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

We had a fast, non-magnetic minibot that we showed everyone in the video right after ship.

We couldn't deploy it reliably.

We saw what 148 and 1429 did at Alamo, and said, "huh, so that's how you do it..." and set off to make one better than those.

FIRST has changed, John, you're right.

Check out this golden oldie from 2002: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1608

A similar discussion, but instead of designs, we were arguing about whether STRATEGIES ought to be made public and copied. As in, "My team's robot will score a lot of tubes, then run back and deploy a minibot". That kind of strategy.

Anyway, if you want a secret, keep a secret. If you want to be flattered, show everyone your robot, and see if they copy it; but don't get your feelings hurt when they do - that was the point all along.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

John,
I have to admit that our team is copying your genius arm potentiometer design.
http://blog.iamjvn.com/2011/03/insid...ntiometer.html

Our potentiometer mounts keeps breaking (we broke our fifth version). Without it we cannot test our autonomous program. Our students have worked hard on the programming, thus I am willing to copy a design to give them a chance next regional to express their own unique ideas.

We are defiantly going to try copying a powerhouse design. I prefer to say reverse-engineer, because we are putting the extra effort to figure out why it works and how we can improve it. We have had a physics model running since the beginning the season. We have been using it to verify the speeds teams have been posting all season long. Its how we concluded that teams must have been removing parts from the tetrix gearbox, improving its efficiency or removing it completely. We opted to try to boost gearbox efficacy by lubricating and breaking in the gearbox but had little success. Upon seeing the 148 video, we knew we had to try direct drive. Your video also eliminated much of the unknown about durability of the tetrix motor.

Presently, we have determined a range of shaft diameters and tested a few possible tread material for durability. Our goal is to set up our minibot to have several interchangeable shafts and magnets, so that we can tinker with these variables. I mention all this because I feel our approach to the minibot will be reverse engineering because of the amount of testing and research we will undertake. The potentiometer design we are going to use is defiantly being copied because of the lack development.

In the real world, there is a lot of reverse engineering. It's an important skill for engineers to learn because everyone does it. I have not encountered a company that does not do it. Every car manufacture does it. It can get pretty grim at times (look up the B-29's that had to land in russia during World War II) but to me its an excepted part of life and gives a company an incredible competitive edge over others who don't. I actually met a micro chip designer who puts dummy traces in his circuits to throw off competitors. It also helps to have a good patent too, I have already read a few poorly written patents that the companies found out the hard way they can't use them to protect their own ideas.

I guess what I am try to say is that reverse engineering is okay. If you just copy without much thought, you are really missing the point. I don't like copying but some cases, like the potentiometer where i have limited time and unlimited vex parts in my closet, are needed to foster a creative solution elsewhere.

By the way John, you have to coolest blog ever! Its the most thought provoking, informative and useful blog I have ever read.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

1538 has no issues sharing designs or information about how and why we do things. We've released CAD models of prior robots, held presentations on our design process, strategies, etc. It's all in the spirit of teaching others and raising the level of competition.

However, I'm too am conflicted on the issue of borrowing minibot designs. But here's my thoughts on the issue.

We spent a lot of time optimizing our minibot by playing with ways of interfacing to the motors, roller sizes, traction material, magnet sizes, magnet spacing, switches, chassis - the list goes on. We have a box in our shop with about 10 different minibot chassis, different sized rollers, different types and sizes of switches. Not to mention the box full of magnets we've experimented with. We easily went through 20 different iterations on just our current minibot design, not to mention the countless concepts we created early on in build season. The bottom line is that we spent a lot of time developing a solution that would give us a competitive edge.

Is it realistic that the 'elite minibots' are going to stay hidden forever? Not really. We compete in public, lots of people are taking pictures, watching the webcast or archived match videos. But it doesn't seem right to just wait around and copy another team's minibot without doing much (or any) design work of their own and receive the same advantage as a team who did the work. To be honest, it's kind of disappointing and not very inspiring. What is your team learning by copying an 'elite minibot'?

There are teams that will arrive at similar designs, without copying another team's work. For example, our minibot is VERY similar to 254's, yet we never talked to each other about our minibots prior to the San Diego Regional. Both teams arrived at similar conclusions after doing lots of experimentation and optimization.

I have no problems with this, since both teams did the work and the students took something away from the process of designing an effective minibot.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

An open question: what about copying with permission?

Say, late in the season, a team approaches another team asking about carbon copying their minibot and deployer. The second team accepts in the spirit of cooperation, and they proceed. Is this acceptable?

Now let's change it up a little. What if the teams agreed to share minibot designs early in the season? Is it OK for the team without a minibot to ask to be allowed to carbon copy if their design falls through?

Does the team without a minibot have to reimburse the team with one in some way?

Say a team approaches you and asks if they can use your deployer as direct inspiration--say, they will take your design but change it to fit properly on their robot. Regardless of whether or not you accept, is their behavior out of line?

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I wonder if the VRC experience—where intra-season copying is facilitated by the long timeframes and relatively simple mechanisms—is influencing John's opinion? I know it's been a struggle for many VRC teams to balance ongoing competitiveness with their natural desire to be open in the robotics community.

Naturally, this the existence of this practice and its side effects aren't lost on the VRC organizers.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

John,

I was wrong to react so harshly.

What I should have first said was:

"John,
.
You are a great asset to the FIRST community and are deserving of great respect for all your contributions and efforts.

Thanks for be willing to put your thoughts down in an effort to have a dialog:
but there are a couple things that disturbed me when I read it.

You admit you were intentionally sarcastic with the intent of deriding the competition approach (perceived in your mental fabrication) of what other FIRST volunteers were using. While you admit you know you shouldn't, I did not read that you admit that you were wrong to use sarcasm and that you will try to react in a better way next time. Because I did not discern an apology, your writing (to me) comes off as a justification of the sarcasm. Maybe it is my misinterpretation of your writing style. Do you think your writing included an apology for the sarcasm and a promise not to attempt to do it again?

Second, you end your essay with the phrase "Don't be a leech". Maybe it is an older brother syndrome of trying to tease younger siblings by name-calling ("You are a blank if you don't do what I say"). I view implied name-calling, no matter how well intended, is not in the spirit of FIRST. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive about derogatory name-calling: what do you think?

The first time I noticed your seemingly accusing sarcastic tone directed at a FIRST volunteer in a posting here, I assumed it must have come out unintentionally: I assumed I must have misunderstood you. To me, your current essay seemed to only be a reinforcement of why you were intentionally sarcastic without any significant sign of remorse nor promise of future efforts to curb it in the future.

Maybe it's all my faulty interpretation- We are all faulty humans. Would you please forgive me if I misunderstood?


Best Regards and Great Thanks for contributing so much to FIRST,
Dick DiPasquale"

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I find Jon's blog on this topic very interesting, because his self-conflicting feelings on this topic is almost identical to how I feel.

One thing I've learned in all of my years in FIRST is that even though you hand someone something on a sliver platter, it doesn't mean they're going to accept it. A couple of great examples:

1) Kris posted that link back to a thread I created in 2002. That year, there was a way to win the game via a chokehold strategy. That thread that I created was a response to another thread in which the chokehold strategy was was revealed to everyone, and then went on to describe how to make a robot to execute the chokehold strategy. I thought that everyone that read that thread would instantly realize how they could easily win the game and that everyone would stop what they were doing and build the chokehold robot. I thought all robots at the championship would be very similar. As it turns out, that thread was mostly a thought experiment as virtually no one changed what they were doing.

2) Look at line-following autonomous this year. I am amazed at the number of robots that are capable scorers that just sit still in the autonomous period. FIRST gave everyone a working, off-the-shelf autonomous solution, and virtually no one did it.

It surprised me in 2002 that not more teams tried the chokehold. I rationalized that as it took too much effort for teams to make the change.

It REALLY surprises me that teams didn't use the canned line tracking code with their robots.

Anyway, I guess my point is that perhaps I overreact when I think everyone is going to have the same minibot in St. Louis.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

John-

I think you've hit the nail on the head in regards to why minibot copying kind of has a different feel to it. It is simply much easier to copy a minibot due to its relative simplicity than other "larger" subsystems.

I headed up the minibot development side of the robot this year. We started with some younger and more inexperienced mentors, but the challenge proved to be a bit larger than we thought (especially when considering our standards for what was an acceptable design).

Our team went through dozens of iterations of minibots. Starting with FTC kit parts, we reached a point where we thought we found the optimal solution using just legal FTC parts. Our team did not think this design would be competitive, and so we started branching out trying to find the OPTIMAL design, and then we'd make it legal.

The key moment for me was a design we created that used a cone shaped drum that was rapid prototyped out of ABS, Vex wheels with tread removed, one bar of FTC u-channel, and one really strong magnet. This design proved to be the most effective by far. As we began optimizing this design in CAD, we came across many issues regarding weight, size and manufacturability. We started to optimize components based on what we could do, and slowly, but surely, our minibot began to take shape.

As we continued to optimize we saw the whole package become tighter, smaller, more integrated. We started doing test runs to further optimize it and must have run the minibot a couple hundred times to reach the point we are at now. We started to optimize other aspects of the minibot like the climb back down, how we turn it on, etc. Some hints from our friends at 148 and 1625 helped us narrow down our design choices and confirm our thought process. The end result was a minibot we are all very proud of on our team.

Our minibot won 10 consecutive minibot races at the Bayou regional when we had everything firing on all cylinders. The minibot attracted much attention from many teams at the competition. The minibot subgroup spent a significant amount of time speaking with teams who had questions about our design. We were happy to help anyone interested out. There were a couple of isolated incidents however, where teams would walk up to us and ask to take a picture of our minibot. When our team responded with a friendly question like, "Well do you want us to explain how it works?", we got a response similar to "Nah, we're just going to copy it from the picture."

These types of events are disappointing to me, because I know how hard our team worked to get our minibot to where it was. Many hours of hard work, countless assemblies and disassemblies of the minibots and many many fried tetrix motors resulted in a rather successful design.

The point of my story is that I don't generally have a problem with teams "drawing inspiration from" or "copying" another teams design, given good intentions. I could see the lightbulb turn on in someone's head when they saw our minibot, and its the same lightbulb thats flickered in my head many-a-time...the one that says "Why the heck didn't I think of that?!". As long as people are willing to use their new found inspiration in the right way, I have no problem with them gathering it.

-Brando

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I kind of get tired of folks saying how somebody chooses to run their team and inspire their students is wrong or unfair.

I don't know how many times I have defended teams like yours JVN when I have heard others say that it's unfair that you have the resources that you do. So like those times I'm gonna tell you how wrong you are.

It would be great if teams had the mentor staff that could help students design and run through the physics and math on how things work like your does. I would guess that most teams don't, especially enough to cover all the different systems on robot.

I have been very clear this year how much I hate the minibot rules but the rules were written this year to be this way. Don't complain when teams choose to take advantage of them.

When a low resource team can take a simple idea from another robot and have a chance to be competitive it can be much more inspiring than learning the specific science behind it.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Keeping this in mind, this is what I have been thinking about minibot "copying". I know my team will be giving out minibots to other teams, and those teams will not necessarily compete against us with the minibots we have designed and built for them, but even if they did I wouldn't mind it. I don't consider what we are doing as allowing another team to copy us, I would consider it helping another team in need, in fact I consider it an ultimate sign of friendship between our team members and the members of teams we are sharing our minibots with, I am proud of this. The minibots will probably be sporting our teams logo on them when used by our friends and I know if we ever needed their help they would give it to us and we would credit them the same way. To some I think this would be walking the line of copying or just completely over the line but its well within the rules this year, in fact it is incouraged.

As for the general topic of copying designs, not just minibots, and under what John has described as what he feels is copying, I feel the same way. If someone were to copy a design of mine I would feel like the I've often felt in school, feeling as if someone eyes were on my answer to a problem as I bubbled in my scantron. However, I have never felt this way about our robots, but I imagine if I had as much experience as John I might have been more exposed to this type of behavior. My outlook at what could be interpreted as copying in FRC today is just plain coincedence or inspired design as John has described it. Not saying that there isn't copying going on, I just haven't seen much, but if there is it just seems like it would be difficult to directly copy another design without feeling a hollow sense of accomplishment.

Where does sharing of a design come in to play here, or does it at all? Many teams share designs, some even collaborate, I would be interested to know what is everyone else's experience with this.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I've run this through multiple iterations in my mind, and I still can't see the fit. Minibots - sure, one could make a carbon copy in a relatively short period, but that would require a high level of robot and mechanism understanding that cannot be bought at Quik-E-Marts.
As for extrapolating the idea of stealing a design idea to a large-scale mechanism/whole robot, I think the notion falls on its face. Without understanding the mechanical, physical, and engineering concepts behind a design, there are so many minute details that would be missed/misinterpreted that the 'carbon copy' would be inferior in many ways.
If it is in fact mechanically at the same level or even better, then it would have to be agreed that learning did take place, reverse engineering did happen, thoughts about the original design process were thunk, and Inspiration did occur.
Either way, on the competition field, the original designers would have the upper hand. An adequate but well-understood and practiced robot will beat a flawless robot controlled by novice hands every day and twice on Saturday. If a team chose to copy our design in 2015 (I'd first have to question their intelligence), I'd first feel honored to be held in such high esteem as to be steal-able, and I'd next feel secure in the knowledge that our deeper understanding of the design, that we gathered through multiple iterations and assembly, and the time spent testing and practicing, would give us the upper hand in competition.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I really hope that feedback here does not dissuade you from continuing to participate. While I don't have a substantial presence here I do enjoy reading your blogs and posts and have no trouble distinguishing between your team position and your work position. Your writing is typically very thought provoking and causes me to analyze my own methods and biases. We all need those invitations to think deeper about things. Even though I don't know you personally, I've garnered a lot of inspiration from your published thoughts and your team's designs. This particularly helps a lot this time of year when I'm feeling burnt out.

We are all seeking for simplicity on the other side of complexity. So regardless of the complexity inherent in the engineering challenge, the size of the simple and hence elegant solution set will likely be small. Prevalence of a particular design will then most likely be inversely proportional to the implementation difficulty. When the game design focus narrows to a small set of objectives then we will see convergence on simple easily implemented solutions as we iteratively improve through competition.

One way of counterbalancing this phenomena is to expand the scope of game objectives. Instead of one or two objectives achievable by a single robot have a multitude of objectives including those requiring multiple robots in order to achieve. Unfortunately this is often at odds with the desire to have a audience friendly competition. I think this balance between game objectives and observability is a difficult one.

One last thought for now... In prior games, it seemed like the game design accommodated both excellent robot design as well as strategy. As robots converge on physics limited performance, the differences between alliance should therefore be resolved via strategy. However given the scoring distribution, it seems likely that difference between alliances may be determined by luck which is very unsatisfying.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I feel as though you shouldn't be able to share your designs on robots, minibots etc because people should learn to make/build their own with help from others but should be forbidden to share.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I don't understand why you would copy a design in the same season. That isn't any fun. If I'm going to compete, I want to compete with my robot, not someone else's!

FWIW, I think even with a directly copied minibot there is a lot of room to flub up. No doubt we'll see some of that. If a team realizes that they've got to build a non-geared minibot to keep pace with the high scoring teams I think that by necessity they'll need to do engineering work to integrate it into their robot. We've seen over and over that deployment is key, and "The devil is in the details."

I understand that some teams have little to no engineering support. That is unfortunate, but at the same time I have a hard time believing those teams get a lot out of straight copying a top-tier minibot. I think there is something to be gained from reverse engineering something like that, but sending John and email asking for details is "cheating" in my world view. There is a lot to be learned looking at pictures of mechanisms and frequently consulting Wikipedia.

-Ian

P.S. Every team should take pictures of every robot at their event. If you see mechanisms you especially like, take pictures and ask about them!

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

The simple minibot solution is a fact of life in this year's game. Teams should expect to see many of the fast direct drive bots with magnets and plan accordingly.

Copying a design is okay, and I agree that we should try to give credit where it's due. I think it should be acknowledged that it's difficult to make significant design changes after the shipping deadline, because our access to the robot is limited to the precious hours we get in the pits at regional competitions. There are only so many meetings we can hold in the in-between weeks before a competition, so it is not that easy to build and program new stuff (keep in mind that most teams don't have two copies of their robot). Any team that manages to copy another team's design has some significant hurdles to overcome. Even if they do, the original designers should have the advantage, because they should be able to tweak their designs while the other teams are busy fabricating and programming new stuff. The original designer also has the benefit of more precious practice time. It's the same situation we have in the middle of the build season - if somebody else showcases their sweet manipulator on the web and my team copies it, we are weeks behind. Whatever one's opinion on the fairness of copying, there is some justice in the advantages inherent to being the first to put together a specific successful design.

If the minibot in this year's game is easier to copy than most other systems, that just means that other aspects of the game will be more important in differentiating teams at the Championship.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Great discussion Folks!

I apologize if I missed someone mentioning the following.......

Just a couple of questions to ponder.

1. Is it better to make a mini-bot "borrowing" another teams' successful ideas or actually borrow the backup that they bring to the competition? FIRST allows both scenario's to happen this year. If the ultimate goal is to learn from the experience, which scenario allows the most learning?

2. Did FIRST think this through prior to kickoff? Why did they allow us to hold back the mini-bot from weight allowances? Did they want the morphing to exist this year?

3. What does Cooperation really mean? Sharing a robot? Sharing a robot design?

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

The discussion has lead my thinking off on a tanget. What happens in a few years when there are 4500 FRC teams and 100 regionals? It seems that these sorts of issues will only be larger. I'm wondering if FRC needs to split at some point - say an A league and a B league. The larger, more experience teams with more experienced students and mentors and better resources would compete in A league regionals. The smaller, less experience teams or teams that have lost experienced students and/or mentors would compete in the B league regionals. The A league would be the more competive league where designs and strategies are more closely guarded. The B league would be more informal, more between team mentoring. There would need to be some built in incentives to compete in the appropriate league - for instance maybe the B league winners don't get an automatic place in the championships. Sorry for going off on a tangent...

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I have a complete opposite feeling about the minibots. Certainly they have caused our team a lot of frustration but for the first time we have really be able to do the true iteration process fully. With the full size robot you often have to make an educated guess and run with it. Sometimes once you realize that "A" is not effective you also find out that to change "A" to be most effective there needs to be a change to "B" which affects "C" and there just isn't enough time left to start from scratch. With the Minibot we built 8 complete iterations and made some minor changes to some of those trying to optimize that particular design before moving on.

I also liked that sharing a minibot was the way to earn Coopertition points. When I told one of the students on the minibot team (I was on the deployment team) about this and that we could win an award because of it here eyes lit up and said well then we need to build 100 minibots. Of course that was a little ambitious since we were still iterating and had yet to make the choice which design was going to go to production. We made the final decision on Mon and set about making it happen. We ended up with 5 minibots thanks to the dedicated members of the minibot team. We had students and mentors essentially work on it as an assembly line process. Everyone sat down and worked on a particular part and we didn't leave until ~11pm Wed when we had 4 completely assembled and tested units and 1 that just needed final assembly and the wiring harness built (we ran out of the appropriate terminals). The 5th was completed by noon on Thur.

We then set out to find people to share it with. Our next door neighbor in the pits was one of the people we approached. The Mentor said I want to have the kids work on their design a little more and if we aren't sucessfull we'll take you up on the offer. They did take the offer and being a strong team with a good deployment system they managed to score with it and it decided a couple of their matches and played a part in getting them to the finals. Had we not had numerous problems in the quarter finals we would have faced them and our minibot in the semi-finals. We would not have taken it back to better our chances. I'm sure that some of our team members including mentors wouldn't have liked that but I wouldn't have allowed them to repo it as that is not in the spirit of FIRST.

Another team that I went out and chose to share another of our minibots with are a young (2nd yr) team that is struggling to maintain, build and fund their team. They had a good deployment system but a big, heavy, not quite completed minibot so they jumped at the chance. They were successful at deploying it to win a match and when it was over the entire student body of that team came to out pit with huge smiles on their faces and thanked us profusely. Later I went by their pit and was talking with their mentors they obviously felt they could learn something from our team and asked lots of questions not only about how we design our robot but how we built our team, recruited members, sponsors and funding. As we were nearing the end of our conversation one of the Mentors asked if we would be willing to sell it to them. I said in no uncertain terms that no it is not for sale but we would be willing to give it to them IF they promised to use it to build their team and promote FIRST through using it in demonstrations.

The 3rd team we loaned a minibot to was a rookie team who showed up with a unworking "box" bot, 3 students and 1 mentor. 6 or 7 of our team members helped get it working, through inspection, and helped them build a deployment system so they had the chance to make score points.

By that time word had gotten out and a 4th team approached us. We said sorry we want to keep our 5th bot as a back up but we have most of the parts needed to complete another bot. So we gave them some parts and instructions on how to make the other parts. It wasn't too long until the came back to show off the fruits of their labor. So maybe they didn't learn much about the design process from it but they learned that there is more to FIRST than just the robot. Hopefully it will inspire them to pay it forward the next and every chance they get.

So yeah I love the minibot because it was a great vehicle to promote our team, make new friends, and possibly make sure a team makes it past their 1st or 2nd year.

Our initial minibot design stunk, it couldn't get traction and when it did it was very slow. So while our team was waiting to get a final minibot design so we could finish the deployment system I started watching the videos here on CD and found the post with a picture of a trans that had been opened. I shared that with the minibot team and we went to work figuring out the best way to do that with the resources we had. In the mean time the videos of the direct drive minibots with sub 1.5 sec times started showing up. Again we set out to build a design inspired by those. We couldn't get it right we either ended up with a minibot that spun it's wheels half way up the pole and wasn't any faster, or too much normal force which slowed it down or smoked the motors. None of our designs was a direct copy of any particular design but inspired by many of the designs we saw. In the end the modified gear box design won out due to it's consistent 1.8 sec performance.

Remember what Dean and Woodie have said numerous times "It's not about the Robot, the Robot is just a vehicle." In this case the minibot was a vehicle we used to promote our team, and teach our and hopefully members of other teams about the true spirit of Coopertition. While FIRST wants the program to produce young adults that go on to be engineers, not every student on every team wants to be an engineer. We've got kids that want to be Veterinarians, Nurses, Lawyers, Pilots and many other things besides an engineer, so the best thing we can do for them is to teach them to learn how to solve problems and learn from their own and others successes and mistakes and always act as gracious professionals.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I am a big supporter of using and improving on designs from previous years. This season when we were debating potential designs our team could pursue, my first thought was to go back to 2007 and look at what worked then. I suggested a 4-Bar Linkage arm similar to what 1902 did, because I truly thought that it was one of the best, most simple and effective designs from the season. Our team when in a different direction than that, but one that shares some similarities to 67 from that season. I don't know if we were directly influenced by them in our design (I don't handle any actual mechanical work just give strategy advice and game analysis to the mechanical team), but looking at our robot this year and theirs from 2007, you can't help but see some similarities.

As for in season design "stealing", I think there is some amount that is acceptable. Full robot "stealing" is certainly not the way I would go about it. There is room for using designs that other teams came up with if you adapt and learn from them. We had issues with our minibot deployment at the Kettering District. Due to not having enough to revise the idea (my one suggestion that made it on our robot...), our driver had roughly a half-inch in which he could line up and successfully deploy our minibot. Team 33 had an alignment solution that our minibot team loved, so after the event we spent the next two weeks prototyping and designing a device similar to what they used. We went through at least three iterations of this design (that I know of, again I don't personally work on these things, I just walk in our build room to check on how things are going) before finalizing what we mounted on our robot last night.

Just as strategies and games evolve throughout a season, robots will as well. Teams will adapt designs or different plans based on what they see that works. If that is a minibot design, an arm design, a ball manipulator, or an entire robot design people will use what they see works and attempt to make it better.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I wish this entire post could be stickied with a spotlight and I hope those who spent their valuable time designing this anniversary game have the opportunity to read your post - and smile.

Wow.

Jane

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

This is an interesting discussion and I'm not quite sure where I stand on it.

However, I can tell you
-that 33 gave a complete tour of our minibot to anyone who asked at Kettering.
-that we already had ideas for a direct driven minibot, but decided to go with the one we had for consistancy until another option could be made as consistant.
-that we went around the Kettering pits and looked at all of the other minibots.
-that our dd. minibot plans changed significantly after Kettering.
-that we do not plan on having the same minibot for our next competition.

Are we in the wrong? I tend to think not.

Regards, Bryan

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I had a thought about this years game based on this subject in general. If you really take a look at it, and the fact that this is an anniversary game, it almost looks like some of this was intended by the GDC. Its almost as if they asked the question...

"If you could replay a game, in this case Rack n Roll...how would you go about it? Would you take your own robot from that game and just remake it? Would you take a look at another team's robot that you admired and make it? Would you come up with something completely different?"

Take a look at the designs of the robots this year. We have seen everything from Pink Clones, to Beatty Clones, to Poof Clones and beyond. Some teams essentially said...yeah, we'll just go with the same thing and throw a minibot on it. We have also seen some completely out of the box designs that took some guts and ingenuity to put together. In all cases I salute you!

Now we are half way through the season, and it almost seems like with the minibot, we are going through a micro version of the same questions...

"If you could replay the race part of this game, how would you go about it? Would you take your own robot from that game and just improve it or even leave it alone? Would you take a look at another teams minibot that you admired and make it? Would you come up with something completely different?"

In this case, it seems that the predominant way to go has been the middle case. It leads you to wonder...will anyone manage to come up with case 3...be out of the box completely and blow us all away? I think any team who doesn't at least try thinking about that portion would be crazy. Every little bit to give you an edge helps.

It may very well be a coincidence that this keeps coming up this year, however, no one can dispute that it is well within the rules. The question that seems to be surrounding this is in the morality of the case. Last year we had arguments over the morality of 6 v 0 strategy. I was extremely critical of some teams for using the strategy, and looking back on it I felt that I was wrong to judge anyone for it. Much like this, 6 v 0 was well within the rules...teams realized that, they used it to their advantage, and they benefited from it. Here we are a year later, and we are at yet another moral crossroads. Are we just becoming some sort of moral social experiment?

Its starting to make me wonder.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Are we capable of thinking beyond and moving past knee jerk reactions? If that answer is yes then I think we could be a part of a social experiment that could strengthen our worldwide communities and how we all react towards each other and with each other in and beyond robotics.

Dr. Flowers' Kick-Off speeches offer glimpses of answers regarding your question, I think.

Jane

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I definitely witnessed this in Seattle. I couldn't count the number of 2046 shirts fully involved in helping get their robot past inspection.

On our end of the pits, several of our students were also 'called to duty' to help a rookie team in a similar situation. Other nearby veterans also jumped in (360, 488, etc).

"No robot left behind"

If the sight of veteran students helping rookie teams doesn't inspire you, then you don't understand FIRST.

Our own team's minibot design has gone through several iterations, none of which have been optimal for our combination of deployment system and deployment height. The kids are looking at other teams' designs as possible examples; they're definitely inspired by them, they've tried reverse-engineering some... but all along, they're trying to understand everything that makes a particular design "tick". It's continuous improvement.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Too funny... I read through your blog yesterday and was going to post but didnt get the chance (hmm real work got in the way?? lol). The funny part about it was in my mind I was saying "No way... a day where I actually agree with John?!?!" But my agreement was merely in the conflicting feelings.

EXACTLY. I am a Systems Engineer... I am constantly fighting the whole irrational thought of "Its no good if its not designed here." The best & brightest companies take someone elses design and improve it. There are even company mottos that say "We don't make the things you buy, we make the things you buy BETTER". The real world of engineering very very much includes reverse engineering and understanding other companies designs.

I think it all depends on what your motivations are. If you are a team that has decided all of the inspiration comes DURING the build season, and the competition season is just for the fun of it, then I completely see this being the correct stance. However, if your ultimate goal is to WIN the competition, and to do it however you can (within the rules), it makes SENSE to iterate on your designs, it makes sense to look to other teams for inspiration. Neither way is WRONG, its just a different way of looking at things, and different goals, both achieve the objectives of FIRST.


Now... for my thoughts.

1. For the past several years, I've beat in the "be inspired by past years" idea into 1511's head. WHY on earth would we reinvent the wheel when we can take the wheel and improve on it? Every kickoff day one or more of us sits for hours pouring over other teams designs, pulling out the succesful & unique ones and compiling a giant slideshow of robot photos. We print them out and bring them in for Sunday's design session, spreading them all over one of our tables. I HATE reinventing the wheel, I'd rather improve on it.

2. I've told this story before, but in 2008 the rails sagged and made our design for hitting the trackballs useless without being able to measure the field (which they would NEVER let us do). I kept forcing our team to try and iterate and get it right, but to no avail. Our student coach finally had our mechE team make up one of the simple lexan flippers. A design I believe we first saw on 1507 and other FLR robots. A literal direct copy. I nearly flipped out on him. I hated that we couldnt solve it ourselves, that there was no better way than directly copying someone elses design. Yet it worked beautifully, and our team was MUCH happier winning matches than getting hung up on the stupid rails for a saggy field.

3. Last year, a couple of our students worked insanely hard on a lifter design, that just well didnt cut it at FLR. In that week 1 we saw 217's lifter mechanism, and had seen videos/photos of 148 & 1114. Ours didnt work, even marginal improvements would probably not help. I personally didnt think we had the time to redo it entirely (though I was at a distance). The team took the 148 design, found the flaws (sorry John!), and redesigned with "inspiration" from the 148/217/1114 type design. They ran into a few hiccups along the way, and learned a lot. This wasn't a direct copy, but it was inspired within the season, though I would say it was somewhat similar to one idea that was pitched early in the season.

But I think the REAL question is what kind of credit should be given? If you asked any of our designers they would know exactly where it came from. If you asked some random team member, they might not know. Most of us that are active on CD will freely admit where we got ideas from, and will never take credit for someone elses idea. But is that enough? Should everyone put on little stickers that say "Inspired by XYZ FIRST Team"? Should the students have to tell the judges where they got the idea? What is enough?

I was happy to hear that successful teams like 67 copy in season. It makes me feel like maybe its not such a bad thing.

I do think its a very very difficult thing to copy a design without learning anything from it. I can't think of a time that we ever did that, and I don't know of a time that anyone else did either. So maybe it isnt all bad?

But I go back to my "What is your Ultimate Goal" point. John, you've said multiple times that 148's ultimate goal is to win events & win championship. I KNOW that you inspire many kids along the way, so I don't want that debate to come back up. But if YOUR Ultimate Goal is to win the championship, and MY ultimate goal is to win the championship, and your design is clearly better than my design, how do I win the championship? I either have to improve my design beyond yours, copy yours, or copy & improve yours. Which takes the least amount of effort? Right or Wrong, copying designs is the fastest way to winning when it is done correctly. If you decide in your musings that it really is wrong/unfair, go back to the "sheet over your robot" days and stop posting designs :).

Ultimately kids are learning, teams are playing hard, the teams that worked hard to begin with are being rewarded (and very often credited), and kids are being inspired... isn't that what this is all about?

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I think case 3 was already put in place by a few different teams. Teams then began putting their own spin on it (making clones) and here we are. The reason I don't expect to see another case 3 minibot this season is because now people know what is successful. These teams know what works now, and can simply duplicate to get to a competitive level. We may see a couple minibots come out from teams who already have competed with a minibot which up the game again. The minibot is just so easy to duplicate, both in time and money, that teams practically have to resist the urge to duplicate one.

The jury is still out though, I'd love to be blown away again.

-Brando

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Hmm, just a suggestion, but I think that next time before you post something where you haven't made up your mind on a topic you should put a disclaimer at the top or constantly remind everyone that you have conflicting feelings. Otherwise, when people read the post's strong language they can make incorrect conclusions from it.

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Funny, I know that our team is in the process of building one of these master mini-bots. I have a sense of irony reading this because one of my team members who worked full season on the mini-bot was just noting their frustration (best word I can think of) today about how they worked for six weeks on the dang thing and now learn that they can build a better version by the end of the week. I'll pass this blog post on to them, I'm sure they will find it very interesting.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Just a word from the captain of a really no name team:
There are teams that have a lot of resources, and there are those who have less, and there are those who have none. My team fell under the category of NONE, i mean zip, zero, nein, no funds at all. I have heard a lot of teams complaining about the teams that have a lot of resources, never mind that they've been around FOREVER, never mind that they have worked their butts off to get where they are, never mind that they do everything they can to help a team in need; lets just complain about them winning a competition, and complain that they have more than us. Get a grip guys. seriously.

We began in 2010 with four students and a mentor all who had no clue what we were getting into. We went to competition with a kit chassis, a wooden board screwed on top with a few electrical components slapped on (velcroed, and i'm not kidding, because we had nothing else to use), a wooden board to keep balls from rolling under the front of the bot, and a piece of tubing stretched across the sides to stop balls from coming underneath on the sides. We could move around, and that was about it.

We came to Peachtree, and saw the most amazing thing in the world. Finally a competition where there were real professional players and everyone willing to help everyone. In a matter of minutes, there were teams swarming our pit coming to visit "the new guys", and to help out. A few teams saw our bot, and took it into their hands to help us. They donated and helped us build an 8020 cage around the bot to keep from being demolished from their own resources, helped us fix chain, helped us re-write code, all of the top-tier teams did all they could to help us.

Now, as captain, looking back, everyone seems to forget that powerhouse teams such as 148, or 254, or 330, or 33, or whoever, will do everything within their power and ability to help out another team no matter what. I contacted team 254 at the start of this year because with the extreme increase in the amount of people this year, I decided it would benefit us to see how such powerhouses goth where they were, and to see how they manage the their teams. Instead of saying that the mentors do all the work on those teams, maybe people need to take a step back and re-evaluate their own teams. 254 told me that anything they could do to help, mechanically, design related, marketing related, anything, that they would do anything to help us. That includes sharing designs and what they have learned in the past. instead of criticizing them, maybe the FIRST community needs to try and be more like them. These teams realize that not everyone has an entire NASA research center at their disposal, not everyone has thousands of dollars to spend on fabrication equipment. But they do extend their hands to the community if all we would do is ask.

Using others designs to improve upon, is not copying. it's innovation. The first thing that i did when came hope from kickoff this year was begin researching what worked and what didn't work in similar games in past competitions, especially 2007. That's research. Learn from others mistakes, learn what didn't work and what worked instead to harping on teams that have been-there-done-that. give them credit and thank them for saving you the trouble of learning the hard way. That's what FIRST is about people. Collaboration, Innovation, and Gracious Professionalism.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Thanks so much!!!!!

A big thanks to you as well. A big congrats too on your excellent performance and all the hardware you received at Olympic.

Just to be clear we learned our ways from the likes of the world class teams in WA such as yours as well as The Skunks, Chill Out, X-bot and The Revolution.

I'm always amazed at how our students step up to the plate when called to duty. When another team needs help if the best member of the team to help isn't near by I pull out the cell phone and start making calls until that person is located. A simple "a team needs help with X" is all I have to say and within a blink of an eye they are there asking who and where.

As a mentor I know how much blood, sweat and tears goes into building a robot and I just couldn't stand to see a team not make it on the field. So while us some of us may know in the big picture that it's not about the robot, to a rookie team it's all about the bot, and the rest can come later, IF they can stick around long enough.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

That's the reader's fault for skimming and not reading thoroughly, not the original poster's fault.

TL;DR - In order for people to thoroughly understand the intricate concepts and ideas being outlaid in a long post, it may be necessary to fully read through the entire post without skimming. Using these critical reading skills are also of utmost importance to determine whether or not the post is written in a sarcastic or satirical tone; after all there is usually always a handful of people in your class that were horrified by Swift's A Modest Proposal as they did not understand it to be a satirical work. There are also times, such as in the case of the OP, where a column or op-ed has no definitely white-or-black solution/thesis but reflects on the author's torn opinion on the matter. Thus, while fully reading everything in a post may be a moderately time-consuming process, understanding the problem at hand the the arguments presented by the poster is more critical than saving thirty seconds so you can look at photos of lolcats.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

shortest tl;dr I have ever read :D

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

Any issue sufficiently nuanced to be worth discussing at length probably can't be contained in a tl;dr. :D

I think you hit my nail on the head here. I think the competition is "for fun", but at the same time, you play to win. FRC is similar to NCAA Div I, because a lot of these kids will grow up to do this for real. (Sadly our coaches miss out on the million dollar salaries...)

In my view, whatever my team decided to put on the robot probably had a lot more time and effort put into it than the few hours we could weasel out of our FIX-IT window. I have only ever competed at week 1 events, and when we went to the championship we were too burned out after the season to make much use of our windows... so that might play into my view.

Re: Musings on Design Inspiration
 

I feel like I should add that it's important to note that the goals of FIRST and its intended methods of achieving the goals are entirely open-ended.

As mentors, you can inspire your students by designing a robot and showing them how it works, or you can let them learn form their mistakes by taking a back seat.

As students, we can become inspired by Science and Technology by aiming at winning the competition, or just enjoying the six weeks of the build season.

Both groups can consider inspiration to come from your own, likely unique creation, or be inspired by building an iterative design, with hopeful improvements, that is successful in competition.

That's why I don't understand, but appreciate the point of debate of this or coaches/mentors on a drive team. While it is great to see how teams go about inspiring their students, whether or not it is in the spirit of the rules is moot. It's intentionally open.