Musings on Design Inspiration

[Basel A]

The question of how Coopertition plays into all this is an interesting one. Copying is one thing, but in borrowing a minibot you don't even get the experience of building it, and an even lesser admiration. However, FRC is encouraging this behaviour. Perhaps when one team had no minibot at all, this is the slightest bit understandable, but in cases I've seen, a borrowed minibot has simply replaced another, and a team has undermined its own work to seek greater success.

[GGCO]

John,

I have to say that I disagree with you on this one. I appreciate your quest for "justice" as you called it, but I think your first part of your post contradicted and proved the second part wrong. You even said that the relatively new found openness and transparency has benefited the ENTIRE FRC community and has bumped up the level of competition several notches.

Now as far as this being unfair, I disagree. That's just life. Take the iphone for example. When it first came out it was absolutely revolutionary, but over time competitors came onto the market and now there are many Android powered phones that are (in my opinion) superior to the iphone.

The minibot is to FRC teams as the iphone is to Apple. It's true that teams like 148 put hours upon hours in R&D with their minibots, and yes it's true that other teams (COMETS Robotics included) are seriously looking at copying successful minibot designs, but it's also true that this "unfairness" makes this season an even more realistic engineering challenge.

If teams wanted to hide their minibots, then by all means do so! Have it covered up, put opaque shielding around it, and make sure no one sees it inbetween matches! Just don't have it in plain sight and expect to have people not be inspired by it (or copy it). To my, that's what's unfair.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by GGCO

If teams wanted to hide their minibots, then by all means do so! Have it covered up, put opaque shielding around it, and make sure no one sees it inbetween matches! Just don't have it in plain sight and expect to have people not be inspired by it (or copy it). To my, that's what's unfair.

Sorry John,

I think I have to agree with Grant on this one. When "copying" designs I think it is up to mentors to teach kids why something is being made. And to be honest, with something like the minibots this year, there's many teams who worked their way down to the "barebones" style minibot, as I like to call it, on their own. 1647 is one example of such case (only example I have because I worked with them as they iterated their minibot design). Many teams also willingly helped others such as Aren of 1625 and Dustin from 816.

I guess what I just want to add in is for everyone to not go ahead and assume that if a team's minibot resembles the basic designs of another that it is a copy. Minibots when optimized are pretty easy to "steal from the best" but IMHO very hard to fulfil the "invent the rest" part of the equation.

+$0.02

[jvriezen]

Originally Posted by Basel A

The question of how Coopertition plays into all this is an interesting one. Copying is one thing, but in borrowing a minibot you don't even get the experience of building it, and an even lesser admiration. However, FRC is encouraging this behaviour. Perhaps when one team had no minibot at all, this is the slightest bit understandable, but in cases I've seen, a borrowed minibot has simply replaced another, and a team has undermined its own work to seek greater success.

In our team's case, we had an average minibot, a great deployment and our alliance captains team decided to replace our average minibot with their faster minibot during Saturday lunch time-- the net result is that our minibot was able to beat theirs up the pole (due to deployment differences -- actually our average one beat theirs as well, when we had to revert back to it later in elims) I didn't see that as undermining our own work, because at that point, we were pursuing the best opportunity to win the competition (which we ALMOST did.)

John Vriezen
Team 2530 "Inconceivable"
Mentor, Drive Coach, Inspector