Quote:
Originally Posted by wilsonmw04
First year here so i can't comment on the "drop in quality".
What we can do to improve the quality of 'bots in the future is much easier to deal with. SHARE what you know. Find the 2-3 rookie, or young, teams in your area and help them out. Share what you know about, drive trains, scoring devices and the rules of the game. Share your resources: mentors, programming and tools. This will help quality, nothing else.
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You are right. Many veteran teams are willing to share their knowledge. Moreover, there are many resources on CD and FIRST websites.
However, this thread is discussing the drop in quality of robots overall through FIRST. There are not as many robots putting up tubes as tetras in the 2005 game.
Due to the variable nature of the tube and rack, I think it is harder for teams to adapt. The tube has been inflated out of FIRST specs at regionals, unintentionally. Some teams only designed their robots to work with the official specs. As we have seen through the years, if you design your robot to work with extreme precision of the game piece/object, you are going to be disappointed(most of the time, atleast). Another common trend is more than usual teams end up dropping their tubes because they are not gripped properly. And then, they try to put it on the rack and waste even more time because the tube will most likely drop on the floor anyway. Paul, I hope your white paper will address some of these concerns for teams interested.
The rack jerking around at times with no effort doesn't help either. It looks like many teams take a long time to get into position, and then if the rack moves, they have to reposition. Granted, the stingers are there for a reason and you can use them to your advantage to hold the spider leg in place. Many teams don't/cannot use it. As Billfred pointed out, it is also hard to replicate accurately. We have had to reprogram the heights of the spider legs at every regional - but that isn't so hard.
This is just my opinion. I had no intentions of offending anybody/team/robot.