[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Samwaldo

I personally viewed all robot in 3 day groups as what the "worst" robots will be! They all released alot of info about there mechanisms, so it would be easy to copy them for most rookies and teams. It was OUR job to be better than the 5 robot in 3 days. We have 1 or 2 similiar mechanisms. We knew many pickups would be the same so we built ALOT of horizontal pickups in order to perfect it. Our baseline that we knew we had to better than was the 5 robot in 3 days

I wish this were true but teams in the past have failed to replicate perfectly good designs that were available to them that should have made the game competitive.

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

I bet if we had Ri3D in 2011, we may have had more exciting elimination matches than these: http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2011ga

We didn't need Ri3d that year because we had "FIRST Behind the Design" from 2007 showing the best designed robots for fast aquisition and placement of tubes and most teams failed to utilize this information.

I would love to see a bunch of Ri3D based robots, but there always seems to be a reason* that the best designs when made available aren't used.

* Usually teams thinking "we can do better on our own", not having the facilities or money to build/purchase the components necessary.