Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur
While I support your sentiments ... It is my belief that Ri3D is a decent starting point. Anyone who brings a Ri3D robot to a competition will have a hard time winning.
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The problem is, this isn't really true. Ri3D's lifespan has coincided, perhaps without coincidence, with a dramatically increased awareness of just how poorly the average FRC robot performs at achieving the game's objectives. This year, as has happened every year Ri3D has been a thing, the reveal threads are going to be filled with statements like "This robot could probably win 30% of regionals and be picked at 100% of them," a number of particularly effective Ri3D clones are going to be widely celebrated as smart decision making, and a very large number of teams with underperforming or broken down robots are going to be told, perhaps a bit smugly, "You should try this cool thing called KISS, have you heard of Ri3D? You could've built a better robot in 3 days." "Build an Ri3D bot, be a 2nd pick, win" is many people's idea of what most teams should be doing. And while they feel wrong to us, the truth is that these statements are very often factually accurate. The only year I can think of where
allRi3D robots were very clearly several steps behind most better-than-average robots is 2015, a game where being good demanded ambitious scope and breaking assumptions from the past, whereas Ri3D, and unfortunately most FRC games, emphasize the opposite.
I don't really know how to feel about Ri3D. I like that is provides a very visible icon of what an effective design process looks like, with enough time for most teams to implement it themselves. I like the emphasis on prototyping. I like that it pushes teams to do
better than the Ri3D teams, though it's been my perception that the community comes right back and says "actually, just be exactly like them instead please." I like that it exposes teams to ideas on how to solve the problem, but I don't like the tendency for the chosen ideas to be presented and interpreted as the
correct or
best ideas. Having so many teams may reduce this effect a bit, but it also runs the risk of more or less encompassing most viable/mainstream approaches to the challenge, and dramatically reducing detailed design variation when a majority of teams have a physical standard to build their robot to after only three days, whether or not they were initially inspired by the Ri3D teams. I think the design diversity experienced in a stroll through the FRC pits, on both a full robot scale and in the tiny details, is one of the most inspiring experiences the program has to offer, and I don't like Ri3D's intentional or not reduction of this. Everyone talks about how it reduces diversity on a macro scale, but I've honestly noticed it more on a micro scale (little things like COTS tricks, gripper material choice, and so on), and don't like it there either. I definitely don't like how much teams are able to shortcut their own processes using Ri3D, or are encouraged to nix pursuit of their own concepts due to the presence of Ri3D and a ticking clock. I also don't like that it very often seems to serve as glorified advertising for COTS parts, often at the expense of optimal design, and has played a large part in perceived "kit-ification" of FRC in recent years. On the other hand, all of these things have absolutely increased the average performance and average level of success a low to mid level FRC team sees. And that's a good thing, but I also worry about the things being lost to get there.