Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Leedle
As a leader of UW-Madison's IGVC team, I want to say that I really disliked the setup they had in the main tent at IGVC. While I'm sure that the high school teams involved had a lot of fun, the incredible amount of noise produced by the FIRST competition made it very difficult to give our design presentations and work on our autonomous vehicle. Debugging ten thousand lines of code and calibrating vision and other sensor parameters is difficult enough without people yelling and screaming 50 feet away. I think it would have been a much better setup if the FIRST arena was in the same tent as the FIRST pits and far away from the design presentation tent. I think that the stark contrast between the nature of the competitions makes them ill suited to be held at the same event.
While IGVC may seem lame to those not involved, it is not designed to be a pseudo-spectator sport like FIRST, so it is only interesting to people who are interested in developing autonomous vehicles. I think that the FIRST teams in attendance were in general ungracious and unprofessional to the hundreds of college students who were scrambling to get their vehicles working.
- Ken
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Many people from my team felt the same way. Having the field near your "Pits" and presentation tent was hectic for all who attended. I remember getting into the queuing line and practically blocking off one IGVC team from their work area because of the number of teams being queued.
If we have this event next year, maybe they could get a slightly bigger tent for Robofest and FIRST so that we would not be competing for space at an event where we aren't even the main focus. And also as you said, put it
far away from the IGVC event.
The only bright side to this cramped space event is that a few of my team members are super excited to participate in IGVC once they get into college.