[Jon Jack]

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.