[Donut]

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

Essentially teams can use Ri3D as either a way to copy designs or to use the ideas shown as inspiration. I see the teams that just copy these designs as the kids who copy other students homework in school. Do we celebrate those kids and tell them they've been inspired? No, we call that plagiarizing and cheating. The teams the use Ri3D to inspire their kids and come up with even better designs are like the students who instead of just copying answers, ask others for help with their homework so they can understand it. I think we can all agree that having teams who use Ri3D as inspiration are beneficial, but I think people aren't realizing that having teams who just copy might not be so beneficial. Just my two cents.

One of my main concerns with all of the Ri3D/Build Blitz robots is the sentiment expressed in this post, and the kind of arguments or resentment that could cause at competition.

Let me outline our build season so far this year. The team mentors on 167 this year agreed not to discuss the Ri3D type videos until the team's prototyping and design process was basically done in an attempt to preserve wild ideas, and since I am the only member on my team that posts or checks CD regularly we were able to keep things under wraps pretty easily. We prototyped four different shooting mechanisms and four different pick up mechanisms, then spent most of a Saturday comparing and debating different design combinations and their implications for the rest of the robot. Guess what? We essentially arrived at team JVN's design on our own, even a choo-choo style mechanism which had been used previously for the kicker on our 2010 robot with good success. There are some subtle differences in our design (pick up arm has a larger range of motion, fitting in a catcher, etc.) but if some of those things end up not working and getting removed we will look like a team JVN knock off* at a quick glance.

Our team knows that we came up with our design without much outside influence and that the prototyping process was very beneficial, and now we can use those 3 day builds as some guidance on perfecting the mechanisms. For another team at competition though it will be very easy to conclude that "they just copied that design from Build Blitz." And with six different designs done in 3 days this year it will be easy to conclude that about a much larger number of finished robots this year than last. I hope we don't all have to justify to other teams that we didn't steal our design.

*The accusation of being a team JVN clone is one of the higher compliments a team can receive at an FRC competition.