[Anupam Goli]

I honestly think having so many pre-fabbed parts is nice. It doesn't take as much just to have a basic robot be able to play the game. There's still a huge ceiling though, as the best teams will continue to create game specific mechanisms that can insanely outperform any COTS mechanism. I don't think very many teams would be able to get far without having a kit chassis, or without being able to buy COTS gearboxes.

There's certainly an art to engineering, but I find that the students I work with don't want to try and fail, if someone already knows it will fail. They'd rather try something that could potentially work. That may be just our differences in philosophies.

As an outsider, any of these robots will look cool and interesting. As a FIRST competitor and spectator though, I still find it sad that in the day of so many COTS options, teams still cannot field basic machines that can drive and move a game piece. I think some teams may need to reflect on their process, and determine whether buying a COTS intake solution and upgrading it would be more inspirational at competition than designing an intake that fails...