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Unread 17-02-2004, 18:40
Glenn Glenn is offline
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#0060 (Bionic Bulldogs)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: Kingman Az.
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Re: Robot Collaboration

I think you look at this as though it was easy, it wasn’t it was difficult. If we were to do this again next year we have several “lessons learn” to improve our process.

Our hope is that we can show what we did and how we did it to any team that is interested. If other team uses some of our methods they will improve the process and more people that get involved the better we will all are at competing in this game.

I can’t see it working for more than two to three teams in a group given the obstacles to over come. Most teams will not be able to make a process like this work at all and will be more successful on their own. Others may improve there program by new innovative systems such as this.

When I say game I don’t just mean Regionals or Nationals I mean the whole process. We are learning about Free Enterprise. We have to market ourselves to gain sponsorship and raise money, we have to share our wealth with other team to inspire them to grow there business. We have to find designers, machinists, welders, and painters, truckers, and so on to help us complete or task.

No matter what each year each team should do everything it can to make there program stronger and every year we will all be a little better than the year before. Most of the rookie teams are starting off better than we did when we were a rookie because we can give them more tools to work with than there we just a few years ago.

How do we finance, design, manufacture, and ship this product in six weeks? How do we make ourselves as competitive as we can be? We innovate and we learn new ways of doing business. FIRST students have the advantage of learning this years before there time. Some people never learn this in a lifetime and others only years after they are out of school.

This years game is tough, and the game will be won by the best alliance not the best robot. In my opinion the robot design only equates to 25% of the winning alliance. The other 75% rests with the alliances themselves, strategy, and luck.

We are talking about two teams with nearly identical robots out of 900 plus teams do you really think this is going to turn the FIRST world upside down? Do you think this really gives us an unfair advantage?