Quote:
Originally Posted by davidthefat
Do any of you teams out there do collaborations with teams close by? Like having an under the table deal saying if any of you go to finals or something the others follow? Or even literally building the robots all together, using each other's resources and collaborate. I want to may be collaborate with the 2 close by schools, you know who you guys are...  Yes I am thinking about it. |
2791 has done "talking collaboration" extensively for both of its years of existence. Our team's founding mentor also started 1726 and was briefly a mentor on 842, so he and others on the team keep in regular contact. These are both teams that are extremely open about their design process, so it's less helpful than you'd think
but being able to have some really cool people to call is very nice. We've yet to actively build twins with either of them, though, but I guess it could be possible.
We are also an EWCP member, but the extent of EWCP collaboration so far has been basically the same "talking collaboration" as the other teams. I know that could change for 2011 though, particularly with one team...
I'm generally of the mindset that "natural" collaboration is ideal. Talking collaboration facilitates this really well; you can share ideas and concepts early on and if you have similar priorities, you can then decide to do partial or full collaboration. For example, 2791 was considering a 6 motor gearbox for awhile, and other EWCP teams were ready to fabricate this for us since they had similar drivetrains. I hope this is more extensive in the future; this would have been really useful for stuff like ball possession...
As for "pre-alliances", I don't ever set an alliance in stone and never plan to, but I am much more likely to push for my team to pick a friend or collabrative partner than a team we have no history with, simply because the insurance of good alliance chemistry is so vital to success. I don't think any of the actions above are "underhanded", though. We're very open and proud of our collaboration and we do it for the benefit of the students on both teams.