[Brandon Holley]

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