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Originally Posted by cadandcookies
PS: There's nothing about Robot in Three Days that says only professional engineers can compete...
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If I recall correctly, Team O'Ryon was a group of college students, many of whom are FRC alumni and continue to mentor FRC teams.
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Originally Posted by GrifBot
I like RI3D, and certainly hope that there will be some teams doing something like that this year. However, echoing some of the thoughts that peopled have stated, it can be annoying if you think of a great idea, and then figure out that RI3D did it. You don't want to seem like an unoriginal copy cat.
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Due to the constraints that one has to work with (rules, materials, the laws of physics...) there are often only so many good solutions and many independent designs will end up looking similar. The nature of FLL is such that one tends to see much more diversity in design and strategy than in FRC. Yet, at the FLL World Festival, my son saw quite a few other teams from around the world who used strategies and (large and complicated) mechanisms very similar to ones he used. I really doubt that they copied him or that he copied them. They were more pleased and amused and not at all annoyed to see each other.
Many teams did not seem to have problems copying the small-wheeled shooter concept that our friends at Spectrum posted 11 days into the 2013 season. Quite a few teams copied the multi-directional ball collector mechanism that 973(?) used in 2012. So what's the problem with copying what one of the RI3D teams did?
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=111360
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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
Intuitively, sure. However, last year's evidence doesn't really suggest the results scale like that.
In 2014, every design pursued some sort of catapult launcher. All but one used an overhead roller for accumulation. Only O-Ryon differed significantly in terms of the strategy pursued for their robot.
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The relatively simple approaches the RI3D teams implement are probably about right for less experienced, low resource teams to emulate. Due to the short time (3 days), there are only so many approaches that the RI3D teams can experiment with and implement. Some approaches just require too much time to prototype and build. With no disrespect, I don't believe that any of the RI3D teams could have implemented anything like the climbing mechanisms implemented by 254 or 1114 in 2013.