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Re: [moderated] Collaboration
You know, on a much less obvious level, many of the Ford teams have been doing this kind of thing for a few years. In the Detroit area, there's Team Ford FIRST, which is a group of Ford sponsored teams. Many of the teams work within a few miles from each other, because it IS the Motor City, and they've become a "union of teams" as such. Every year, you see two or three of Ford robots that range from looking slightly to remarkably similar - that's because many of the teams colaborate between each other during the inital weeks - strategizing, planning, and designing. They share resources with each other, and I don't think they still do this, but they used to run scrimmages against each other around this time of year.
Albeit this case isn't exactly the same thing - I just see it as the next step up, so I wasn't really surprised by it.
Referencing the car analogy, sometimes the major OEM's do collaborate. The Mercury Villager, for example, is a joint venture between Ford-Mercury and Nissan (The Nissan counterpart is called the "Quest"). The late Mercury Cougar was based off of a Mazda platform. Many GM divisions (Pontiac, Olds, Buick, Saturn) end up building one vehicle and slapping a different badge on it.
The point being that most of these collaborations aren't as successful as the companies hope. The sell a lot of cars, but they aren't really "revolutionary" or even above average. They're just mediocre cars that some people buy, and then they fade off and are forgotten.
I don't mean to insult the Bulldogs or the Poofs by this, I just don't think that they'll be any better than most other robots out there. I hope that they do good, but my feeling is that they won't be the best two teams out there.
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"As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything."
— President Barack Obama
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