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
