[Mr V]

Originally Posted by Duncan Macdonald

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

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.