[Oblarg]

At 4464, we're using a roller-arm to capture the ball. We did not choose this because of Ri3D or BuildBlitz - the idea was a fairly obvious one, and was proposed independently. That many teams are using this exact same solution is unsurprising, as it is a very good one.

We are going to see a lot of design convergence this year, and I think that's more a property of the game than anything else; aside from a dedicated goalie-bot, there is not a great diversity of differing design constraints based on robot goals. The vast majority of robots will pick up the ball and launch the ball. There are only so many ways to do this, and some of the really obvious ones are really good.

I will say that posting complete CADs of finished robots is a bit much - I think Ri3D is a very good resource, but it should not solve the problem fully for a team to the point where they only need to manufacture and code. I would like, in the future, to see it decrease in scope to something closer to what it was last year (though this is unlikely since it proved this year to be a supremely useful marketing tool for FRC suppliers).