[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

I suppose my opinion has been fully formed now that my team's season's over. I've been to two competitions, watched many others, and must have seen hundreds of robots by now. A lot of robots look similar to each other, and a lot of teams have "clones" of Ri3D and build blitz robots, but all of these teams went through a journey to build their robots, and I'm sure that along the way these teams had to iterate their designs. I don't think it's possible to put together a Ri3D/BB "clone" without learning something or having to iterate a part of the design to match your resources.

Not all robots that look like the 3 day projects copied them. Plenty of high performing teams look similar to the 3 day projects, but most likely they prototyped many different mechanisms and through iteration developed their current robot. This may have been the most successful year my team has had, and also one of the most complicated robots we've ever built, but if you strip away the catcher walls, it looks like an 8020 and versaframe version of a team JVN build. (For Reference). I met with an old mentor of mine, and I showed him our robot. His first response was "You guys copied the robot in 3 days, didn't you?". I explained that while our intake and catapult look very similar, the amount of prototyping, designing, and engineering that went into those systems took more than 3 days. I was actually inspired by 2012 over-the-bumper intakes when I first sketched up what would end up becoming the intake on our robot. We did use the "choo choo" mechanism that Aren Hill came up with, but we must have gone through at least 7 iterations of the darned thing before we finally developed one that worked with our system.

I think these 3 day builds have done a great job in helping teams get started and have certainly reduced the number of robots incapable of manipulating the game pieces. Not every robot can manipulate game pieces well, but that's solved by iterating and improving designs, which falls onto teams. It's not necessarily a bad thing that robots look alike. Sure, there's a creativity award, but I think every team wants to field a robot that works, and when there are 6 different concepts that are already presented, it's much easier to do that than starting from scratch.

Building off of this, my team (2046) started off as a RI3D clone, except we shot out of the other end. but what teams didn't always see was our 6 CIM drive, and the efficiency as to which the robot was made. not to mention that we switched to a new collector that collected better, then to a higher angle catapult, and continued to improve. What was nice about the Robot in 3 days videos was that they created a base standard that allowed a team that had never had their robot ready for their first competition of the season be ready for the first competition (and in fact win it), while figuring out how to further improve our robot to continue to be one of the best in the Pacific Northwest (if that's not conceited of me to say; I mean, I am a little biased)