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View Poll Results: Is Battlebots I.Q. a threat to FIRST?
Nope, true quality and decency will show through, XFL 77 34.53%
Although Battlebots will climb up, they won't be that big, think UPN vs. NBC, ABC, or CBS 56 25.11%
They will be on the same level, like American and National baseball leagues 39 17.49%
Battelbots IQ is a better concept and will triumph over FIRST 12 5.38%
Don't Care 39 17.49%
Voters: 223. You may not vote on this poll

 
 
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Unread 21-04-2002, 22:22
vortex vortex is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2002
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Warning - Long post (2/3 the maximum post length )

Hi everyone. I'm new (I just found this place looking for Isaac32 system information), I thought I'd chime in here.

To let you know where I'mcoming from - I haven't competed in FIRST. I never will, as I'm now in college. However, I would have, if my school had it available - however, it wasn't; I'm not sure if people hadn't heard of it, or if people didn't want to pay for it.

On the other side of things, I have competed at Battlebots, twice in fact. The first was with the bot Vortex during Season 3, May 2001, where we lost our first fight; the second was with Kobotsu at BBIQ a few weeks ago,where we went away 2-2. Vortex was built almost entirely with my own money - I put about $2,000 into it. Kobostu was more of a team effort, so I ended up paying about $1,500 of that (about half the cost of the bot, not including the Nicad batteries we reused from Vortex).

Both competitions have their difficulties -

One is that the students don't always do all the work - None of you can say with a straght face that every FIRST bot was built by the students on the team; Neither can I argue that every BBIQ bot was built by the students.

FIRST is expensive - There is no way, with what I paid to have a competative BBIQ bot, that I could build anything remotely competative for FIRST. I've heard of pelnty of FIRST bots costing over $30,000; I challenge you to find a BBIQ bot that cost half that; In the $3-$5,000 range is average, and there have been many junkyard bots build for under $1000; I'd be willing to wager that the average FIRST bot costs more then $5,000. BBIQ bots tended to be somewhat simplistic, with as few mechanisms as possible and often running the default Isaac code (though I take great pride in being the programmer on the team that won the "Best use of the IFI system" special award). These facts are not unrelated. If I had as much money as some of the FIRST teams have, you'd better believe I'd have put more stuff in there; Actually, I'm putting some systems in my next bot that haven't ever been seen in Battlebots before involving intelligent power handling and system power consumption balencing, and I'm doing it out of pocket - I spent this morning putting stuff up on ebay to be able to afford it.

Related is that the two events focus on different kinds of engineering. FIRST focuses on building complex mechanisms to accomplish odd and varied tasks; BBIQ focuses on making mechanisms capable of surviving extreme situations. I've learned a lot about making stuff that doesn't break, partially by seeing what happened to my bot in a couple of whopping hits. I got to see first-hand what made the design weak, and what made it strong. Both knowledge of what makes things strong and knowledge of what makes complex things work is necessary for a good engineer; There is no point in making something that performs a task that constantly breaks, and no point in making something that'll survive WWIII if it doesn't do anything.

So, now you can probably see my point - both are valuable. They are both valuable for different reasons, and they aren't directly comparable - Closer then apples and oranges, but it's not a totally inacurate analogy. I just wish everyone who's just spouting nonsense about how one event is so much better then the other would get off their high horse and take a look at how everything really is, and how it relates to real life - There is almost never one solution, one clear-cut way to do something; There are multiple avenues of success, each of which has it's own advantages and disadvantages.




Now that I've made my point, I'm just going to address a few things that have been posted:

Quote:
That, I like to think is the distinction between a FIRST robotics team and Battlebots IQ team. (limited to only 5 members 4 students 1 adult).
Actually, there were some teams that numbered over 20 individuals; However, there wasn't room in the pit (BB pits tend to be crowded). so only thatmany were allowed in the pits at one time. The teams were issued special pit cards that allowed the cards to be rotated through the team members so that everyone got to come in at some point.


Quote:
At battlebots IQ you see none of these things, and in fact thier robots arent very technical. In the finals there were 2 wedges squaring off. I highly doubt that in a first robot all you will see is a drive train. You wont see technologically advaced machines like thw wildstang robot out there.
There are technical innovations, they just aren't seen in the same way. In a FIRST competition, many of the innovations are external - special systems that allow the robot to perform special operations, often in cool or unique ways. The same happens at Battlebots - there are many cool and unique robots Unfortuately, the concept of KISS applies - many innovations break easily, and you don't see those unless you attend an event - only surviveable things make it to the televised rounds of the competition. Also, many of the innovations are of a different sort - New ways of joining materials, new structures, new kinds of robots.

There are a couple additional issues at work here - FIRST is much less freeform, so you have things meant to do similar things pitted against each other; It's easy to compare them. With battlebots, it's about as freeform as you can get - play within the ruleset, and you can do anything you want. Also, there's a matter of shear number - there's not as many Battlebots as there are FIRST robots. Statistically, you'll get more cool things, just because there's more things to pick them out of.



And to anyone who says BBIQ teams didn't show teamwork and good sportsmanship, they apparently haven't ever been in the pits at a BB event. Before my second fight, I spent 6 hours trying to fix my bot AND helping my next opponant fix theirs; They did likewise. We were both suffering from a similar failure, and both teams worked together to solve it, and then we both helped another team that later suffered the same problem. Everyone shared tools, expertise, workers, materials, knowledge. Except for the occasional bad egg (so rare it sparks massive debate whenever it does happen), BB events show nearly perfect sportsmanship (which unfortunately doesn't get on the show, since Comedy Central doesn't want to show it, conflict brings more money. As a side note, many BB builders don't like CC much due to the way they handle the show).

[I was going to address more statements, but seeing how I'd probably excede the post length limit, as well as my own patience given how long I've been typing, I think I'll stop now )

So, there you have it. Feel free to respond however you wish - I'll probably be back later tonight or tomorrow evening, I'll answer any questions anybody has (within what I know, of course).


Matt Hockenheimer
matt@team-vortex.net
Co-captain, Programmer, Designer
Team Vortex
http://www.team-vortex.net (Presently badly out of date )

Last edited by vortex : 21-04-2002 at 22:25.
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