[Nemo]

At a minimum, it was really interesting to see what the teams could come up with in three days. I'd probably agree that it feels a little odd for the "pros" to take over the game for a few days without any students. Still, it's only three days of work, so even really brilliant people aren't going to come up with a world champion caliber robot that fast. It's more of a baseline that other teams can start from.

Our team certainly benefited from those designs, using a bunch of ideas from the Ri3D and Build Blitz teams. I don't feel too bad about that, because creating a completely original idea is tough in a competition where so many solutions to similar problems have already been created in the past. Our team had a lot of fun and learned a lot from testing and refining the ideas we used. I think engineering is more tweaking and iterating and refining than outright invention. We made a roller collector, a catapult, and a winch with a ratchet wrench + pneumatic release. All of those were different than the originals in some pretty significant ways, and there was plenty of sweat and TLC put into those modified designs.

I wonder what we would have built without Ri3D? I suspect that we would have looked more closely at a Simbot SS design. We would have been researching previous designs in any case.

I'm particularly glad that roller collectors came out in the 3 day robots. That was a really doable mechanism that any team can pull off, and the more robots that can collect a ball, the better. The 3 day teams didn't invent the first ever roller collectors for FRC, but they showed everybody that they are effective for this game.