Quote:
Originally Posted by Brandon Holley
I think some of you guys are a little harsh on the minibots!
Dr. Joe made a prediction in our lab a couple weeks ago, and I am fully on board with it. He basically predicted that minibots would return, but would be REQUIRED to be smart, and not necessarily by rules, but by necessity to complete the task. The example he gave was completing a maze.
I think in an implementation like that, minibots have the potential to be a very cool and different aspect to games that we haven't seen before. It helps break up the somewhat repeatable actions of handling some sort of ball, picking up some kind of tube and placing it on a peg, hanging from a bar of some sorts, etc.
-Brando
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It's still an annoying distraction. They're basically asking us to make two robots to be successful every year, when many teams still are barely making one robot, for whatever reason. It disadvantages many fledgling teams. Also, it detracts from the competition experience - small robots are hard to watch from the stands, and once there is a standout design (even if it has to be smart, it has to work really well), most teams have time between competitions to duplicate it, leading to the identical minibot issue.