Musings on Design Inspiration

[IndySam]

I kind of get tired of folks saying how somebody chooses to run their team and inspire their students is wrong or unfair.

I don't know how many times I have defended teams like yours JVN when I have heard others say that it's unfair that you have the resources that you do. So like those times I'm gonna tell you how wrong you are.

It would be great if teams had the mentor staff that could help students design and run through the physics and math on how things work like your does. I would guess that most teams don't, especially enough to cover all the different systems on robot.

I have been very clear this year how much I hate the minibot rules but the rules were written this year to be this way. Don't complain when teams choose to take advantage of them.

When a low resource team can take a simple idea from another robot and have a chance to be competitive it can be much more inspiring than learning the specific science behind it.

[Greg Leighton]

Originally Posted by JVN

Hi Everyone,
I posted my thought process on this, but I don't think there is anything in my writings as a whole to agree or disagree with. There are literally contradictions in my writings just like there are contradictions in my feelings on the matter.

I don't like seeing "I agree with John" or "I disagree with John" because... I don't know HOW I feel. You'll note that 148 is one of the biggest posters of our designs, and I've been one of the biggest proponents for "raising the level of competition" by sharing what we do. So I hope if anything you'll let our actions speak...

However, I'm curious what others think and feel. I dislike absolutes. I know there are others out there like me who are conflicted about certain aspects of this, and I would love to see them put these feelings into words, to hopefully help me put my feelings into better perspective.

Please continue the discussion!
-John

Keeping this in mind, this is what I have been thinking about minibot "copying". I know my team will be giving out minibots to other teams, and those teams will not necessarily compete against us with the minibots we have designed and built for them, but even if they did I wouldn't mind it. I don't consider what we are doing as allowing another team to copy us, I would consider it helping another team in need, in fact I consider it an ultimate sign of friendship between our team members and the members of teams we are sharing our minibots with, I am proud of this. The minibots will probably be sporting our teams logo on them when used by our friends and I know if we ever needed their help they would give it to us and we would credit them the same way. To some I think this would be walking the line of copying or just completely over the line but its well within the rules this year, in fact it is incouraged.

As for the general topic of copying designs, not just minibots, and under what John has described as what he feels is copying, I feel the same way. If someone were to copy a design of mine I would feel like the I've often felt in school, feeling as if someone eyes were on my answer to a problem as I bubbled in my scantron. However, I have never felt this way about our robots, but I imagine if I had as much experience as John I might have been more exposed to this type of behavior. My outlook at what could be interpreted as copying in FRC today is just plain coincedence or inspired design as John has described it. Not saying that there isn't copying going on, I just haven't seen much, but if there is it just seems like it would be difficult to directly copy another design without feeling a hollow sense of accomplishment.

Where does sharing of a design come in to play here, or does it at all? Many teams share designs, some even collaborate, I would be interested to know what is everyone else's experience with this.

[Taylor]

I've run this through multiple iterations in my mind, and I still can't see the fit. Minibots - sure, one could make a carbon copy in a relatively short period, but that would require a high level of robot and mechanism understanding that cannot be bought at Quik-E-Marts.
As for extrapolating the idea of stealing a design idea to a large-scale mechanism/whole robot, I think the notion falls on its face. Without understanding the mechanical, physical, and engineering concepts behind a design, there are so many minute details that would be missed/misinterpreted that the 'carbon copy' would be inferior in many ways.
If it is in fact mechanically at the same level or even better, then it would have to be agreed that learning did take place, reverse engineering did happen, thoughts about the original design process were thunk, and Inspiration did occur.
Either way, on the competition field, the original designers would have the upper hand. An adequate but well-understood and practiced robot will beat a flawless robot controlled by novice hands every day and twice on Saturday. If a team chose to copy our design in 2015 (I'd first have to question their intelligence), I'd first feel honored to be held in such high esteem as to be steal-able, and I'd next feel secure in the knowledge that our deeper understanding of the design, that we gathered through multiple iterations and assembly, and the time spent testing and practicing, would give us the upper hand in competition.

[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by JVN

I always hope that this is a place where we can all wear our "team hats" and discuss the issues that matter to us. I hope that perhaps others in similar situations would don their team hats and come back here in the interest of common discourse. Perhaps that hope is naive.

I really hope that feedback here does not dissuade you from continuing to participate. While I don't have a substantial presence here I do enjoy reading your blogs and posts and have no trouble distinguishing between your team position and your work position. Your writing is typically very thought provoking and causes me to analyze my own methods and biases. We all need those invitations to think deeper about things. Even though I don't know you personally, I've garnered a lot of inspiration from your published thoughts and your team's designs. This particularly helps a lot this time of year when I'm feeling burnt out.

We are all seeking for simplicity on the other side of complexity. So regardless of the complexity inherent in the engineering challenge, the size of the simple and hence elegant solution set will likely be small. Prevalence of a particular design will then most likely be inversely proportional to the implementation difficulty. When the game design focus narrows to a small set of objectives then we will see convergence on simple easily implemented solutions as we iteratively improve through competition.

One way of counterbalancing this phenomena is to expand the scope of game objectives. Instead of one or two objectives achievable by a single robot have a multitude of objectives including those requiring multiple robots in order to achieve. Unfortunately this is often at odds with the desire to have a audience friendly competition. I think this balance between game objectives and observability is a difficult one.

One last thought for now... In prior games, it seemed like the game design accommodated both excellent robot design as well as strategy. As robots converge on physics limited performance, the differences between alliance should therefore be resolved via strategy. However given the scoring distribution, it seems likely that difference between alliances may be determined by luck which is very unsatisfying.

[anissa]

I feel as though you shouldn't be able to share your designs on robots, minibots etc because people should learn to make/build their own with help from others but should be forbidden to share.

[Ian Curtis]

I don't understand why you would copy a design in the same season. That isn't any fun. If I'm going to compete, I want to compete with my robot, not someone else's!

FWIW, I think even with a directly copied minibot there is a lot of room to flub up. No doubt we'll see some of that. If a team realizes that they've got to build a non-geared minibot to keep pace with the high scoring teams I think that by necessity they'll need to do engineering work to integrate it into their robot. We've seen over and over that deployment is key, and "The devil is in the details."

I understand that some teams have little to no engineering support. That is unfortunate, but at the same time I have a hard time believing those teams get a lot out of straight copying a top-tier minibot. I think there is something to be gained from reverse engineering something like that, but sending John and email asking for details is "cheating" in my world view. There is a lot to be learned looking at pictures of mechanisms and frequently consulting Wikipedia.

-Ian

P.S. Every team should take pictures of every robot at their event. If you see mechanisms you especially like, take pictures and ask about them!

[Nemo]

The simple minibot solution is a fact of life in this year's game. Teams should expect to see many of the fast direct drive bots with magnets and plan accordingly.

Copying a design is okay, and I agree that we should try to give credit where it's due. I think it should be acknowledged that it's difficult to make significant design changes after the shipping deadline, because our access to the robot is limited to the precious hours we get in the pits at regional competitions. There are only so many meetings we can hold in the in-between weeks before a competition, so it is not that easy to build and program new stuff (keep in mind that most teams don't have two copies of their robot). Any team that manages to copy another team's design has some significant hurdles to overcome. Even if they do, the original designers should have the advantage, because they should be able to tweak their designs while the other teams are busy fabricating and programming new stuff. The original designer also has the benefit of more precious practice time. It's the same situation we have in the middle of the build season - if somebody else showcases their sweet manipulator on the web and my team copies it, we are weeks behind. Whatever one's opinion on the fairness of copying, there is some justice in the advantages inherent to being the first to put together a specific successful design.

If the minibot in this year's game is easier to copy than most other systems, that just means that other aspects of the game will be more important in differentiating teams at the Championship.

[Sunshine]

Great discussion Folks!

I apologize if I missed someone mentioning the following.......

Just a couple of questions to ponder.

1. Is it better to make a mini-bot "borrowing" another teams' successful ideas or actually borrow the backup that they bring to the competition? FIRST allows both scenario's to happen this year. If the ultimate goal is to learn from the experience, which scenario allows the most learning?

2. Did FIRST think this through prior to kickoff? Why did they allow us to hold back the mini-bot from weight allowances? Did they want the morphing to exist this year?

3. What does Cooperation really mean? Sharing a robot? Sharing a robot design?

[Tom Ore]

The discussion has lead my thinking off on a tanget. What happens in a few years when there are 4500 FRC teams and 100 regionals? It seems that these sorts of issues will only be larger. I'm wondering if FRC needs to split at some point - say an A league and a B league. The larger, more experience teams with more experienced students and mentors and better resources would compete in A league regionals. The smaller, less experience teams or teams that have lost experienced students and/or mentors would compete in the B league regionals. The A league would be the more competive league where designs and strategies are more closely guarded. The B league would be more informal, more between team mentoring. There would need to be some built in incentives to compete in the appropriate league - for instance maybe the B league winners don't get an automatic place in the championships. Sorry for going off on a tangent...

[Mr V]

Originally Posted by Duncan Macdonald

I've been looking for somewhere to drop an essay and this thread was close.

The whole minibot thing has soured this year a little for me. My worst experience in six years or FIRST was at our first regional where we had brought 2 essentially identical minibots with us (one for us and a backup because our design is a little fragile). We decided before the regional that as long as we didn’t break our primary we would be willing to lend our backup to other teams until eliminations when we hoped to attach it to an alliance partner.

We lent the backup to two different teams at the competition and I couldn’t have more polar opinions of them.

The first was a team who due to geographical inconvenience (aka borders) weren’t able to build a minibot but had a solid looking deployment system with hopes someone would lend them a minibot. We loaned them our backup and “mini bot specialist” for the better part of the second day and third morning. Unfortunately they never were able to successfully deploy it on the field but after the regional they came to our pit and gave our student a box of chocolates as a token of appreciation. That team was a class act.

The second team saw us practice deploying our minibot on the practice field and one of their mentors came over to our student and asked about our minibot. After the student explained the mentor then asked something along the lines of “How much would you sell it to me for?”* The student, who appeared a little distraught, then came over to me and explained what happened. I brushed it off as a failed attempt at a joke and that maybe they would be interested in attempting to deploy our minibot since they were interested. He did. When he came back he said “I left the minibot with them to see if they could make it work and when I came back they were measuring the shafts with a caliper. Then when I told them the other team wanted to try deploying it again the mentor offered to buy it again.”* I told the student not to work with that team anymore and if the mentor asks again, tell him that it will cost him $8000 (approximately the cost for us to get to St Louis). To my knowledge he wasn’t asked again. I would still like to think it has a joke but I have serious doubts.

*Second hand from the student involved.

My opinion with the direct copying thing is that I don’t care for it but it isn't my greatest concern. I’ve decided that in general the team that copies doesn’t come close to being as effective as the “original”. If they do, it is because the original is not trying to continually improve their design, which is just as bad. (As Arthur stated, with the restrictions on minibots this year there is a very reachable performance ceiling and the issue is worse than normal.)

My thoughts on this particular event are:
- Bothered that the student was put in this situation
- Humored that I know they will have design issues
- Not really an issue competitively for us

- We won’t compete against them again
- If we had we’ve since improved our overall design and deployment and still will be faster anyways

-I hope their next event is webcasted. I want to know if it works after all

I have a complete opposite feeling about the minibots. Certainly they have caused our team a lot of frustration but for the first time we have really be able to do the true iteration process fully. With the full size robot you often have to make an educated guess and run with it. Sometimes once you realize that "A" is not effective you also find out that to change "A" to be most effective there needs to be a change to "B" which affects "C" and there just isn't enough time left to start from scratch. With the Minibot we built 8 complete iterations and made some minor changes to some of those trying to optimize that particular design before moving on.

I also liked that sharing a minibot was the way to earn Coopertition points. When I told one of the students on the minibot team (I was on the deployment team) about this and that we could win an award because of it here eyes lit up and said well then we need to build 100 minibots. Of course that was a little ambitious since we were still iterating and had yet to make the choice which design was going to go to production. We made the final decision on Mon and set about making it happen. We ended up with 5 minibots thanks to the dedicated members of the minibot team. We had students and mentors essentially work on it as an assembly line process. Everyone sat down and worked on a particular part and we didn't leave until ~11pm Wed when we had 4 completely assembled and tested units and 1 that just needed final assembly and the wiring harness built (we ran out of the appropriate terminals). The 5th was completed by noon on Thur.

We then set out to find people to share it with. Our next door neighbor in the pits was one of the people we approached. The Mentor said I want to have the kids work on their design a little more and if we aren't sucessfull we'll take you up on the offer. They did take the offer and being a strong team with a good deployment system they managed to score with it and it decided a couple of their matches and played a part in getting them to the finals. Had we not had numerous problems in the quarter finals we would have faced them and our minibot in the semi-finals. We would not have taken it back to better our chances. I'm sure that some of our team members including mentors wouldn't have liked that but I wouldn't have allowed them to repo it as that is not in the spirit of FIRST.

Another team that I went out and chose to share another of our minibots with are a young (2nd yr) team that is struggling to maintain, build and fund their team. They had a good deployment system but a big, heavy, not quite completed minibot so they jumped at the chance. They were successful at deploying it to win a match and when it was over the entire student body of that team came to out pit with huge smiles on their faces and thanked us profusely. Later I went by their pit and was talking with their mentors they obviously felt they could learn something from our team and asked lots of questions not only about how we design our robot but how we built our team, recruited members, sponsors and funding. As we were nearing the end of our conversation one of the Mentors asked if we would be willing to sell it to them. I said in no uncertain terms that no it is not for sale but we would be willing to give it to them IF they promised to use it to build their team and promote FIRST through using it in demonstrations.

The 3rd team we loaned a minibot to was a rookie team who showed up with a unworking "box" bot, 3 students and 1 mentor. 6 or 7 of our team members helped get it working, through inspection, and helped them build a deployment system so they had the chance to make score points.

By that time word had gotten out and a 4th team approached us. We said sorry we want to keep our 5th bot as a back up but we have most of the parts needed to complete another bot. So we gave them some parts and instructions on how to make the other parts. It wasn't too long until the came back to show off the fruits of their labor. So maybe they didn't learn much about the design process from it but they learned that there is more to FIRST than just the robot. Hopefully it will inspire them to pay it forward the next and every chance they get.

So yeah I love the minibot because it was a great vehicle to promote our team, make new friends, and possibly make sure a team makes it past their 1st or 2nd year.

Our initial minibot design stunk, it couldn't get traction and when it did it was very slow. So while our team was waiting to get a final minibot design so we could finish the deployment system I started watching the videos here on CD and found the post with a picture of a trans that had been opened. I shared that with the minibot team and we went to work figuring out the best way to do that with the resources we had. In the mean time the videos of the direct drive minibots with sub 1.5 sec times started showing up. Again we set out to build a design inspired by those. We couldn't get it right we either ended up with a minibot that spun it's wheels half way up the pole and wasn't any faster, or too much normal force which slowed it down or smoked the motors. None of our designs was a direct copy of any particular design but inspired by many of the designs we saw. In the end the modified gear box design won out due to it's consistent 1.8 sec performance.

Remember what Dean and Woodie have said numerous times "It's not about the Robot, the Robot is just a vehicle." In this case the minibot was a vehicle we used to promote our team, and teach our and hopefully members of other teams about the true spirit of Coopertition. While FIRST wants the program to produce young adults that go on to be engineers, not every student on every team wants to be an engineer. We've got kids that want to be Veterinarians, Nurses, Lawyers, Pilots and many other things besides an engineer, so the best thing we can do for them is to teach them to learn how to solve problems and learn from their own and others successes and mistakes and always act as gracious professionals.

[JackN]

I am a big supporter of using and improving on designs from previous years. This season when we were debating potential designs our team could pursue, my first thought was to go back to 2007 and look at what worked then. I suggested a 4-Bar Linkage arm similar to what 1902 did, because I truly thought that it was one of the best, most simple and effective designs from the season. Our team when in a different direction than that, but one that shares some similarities to 67 from that season. I don't know if we were directly influenced by them in our design (I don't handle any actual mechanical work just give strategy advice and game analysis to the mechanical team), but looking at our robot this year and theirs from 2007, you can't help but see some similarities.

As for in season design "stealing", I think there is some amount that is acceptable. Full robot "stealing" is certainly not the way I would go about it. There is room for using designs that other teams came up with if you adapt and learn from them. We had issues with our minibot deployment at the Kettering District. Due to not having enough to revise the idea (my one suggestion that made it on our robot...), our driver had roughly a half-inch in which he could line up and successfully deploy our minibot. Team 33 had an alignment solution that our minibot team loved, so after the event we spent the next two weeks prototyping and designing a device similar to what they used. We went through at least three iterations of this design (that I know of, again I don't personally work on these things, I just walk in our build room to check on how things are going) before finalizing what we mounted on our robot last night.

Just as strategies and games evolve throughout a season, robots will as well. Teams will adapt designs or different plans based on what they see that works. If that is a minibot design, an arm design, a ball manipulator, or an entire robot design people will use what they see works and attempt to make it better.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by Mr V

By that time word had gotten out and a 4th team approached us. We said sorry we want to keep our 5th bot as a back up but we have most of the parts needed to complete another bot. So we gave them some parts and instructions on how to make the other parts. It wasn't too long until the came back to show off the fruits of their labor. So maybe they didn't learn much about the design process from it but they learned that there is more to FIRST than just the robot. Hopefully it will inspire them to pay it forward the next and every chance they get.

So yeah I love the minibot because it was a great vehicle to promote our team, make new friends, and possibly make sure a team makes it past their 1st or 2nd year.

I wish this entire post could be stickied with a spotlight and I hope those who spent their valuable time designing this anniversary game have the opportunity to read your post - and smile.

Wow.

Jane

[BJC]

This is an interesting discussion and I'm not quite sure where I stand on it.

However, I can tell you
-that 33 gave a complete tour of our minibot to anyone who asked at Kettering.
-that we already had ideas for a direct driven minibot, but decided to go with the one we had for consistancy until another option could be made as consistant.
-that we went around the Kettering pits and looked at all of the other minibots.
-that our dd. minibot plans changed significantly after Kettering.
-that we do not plan on having the same minibot for our next competition.

Are we in the wrong? I tend to think not.

Regards, Bryan

[Andy Grady]

I had a thought about this years game based on this subject in general. If you really take a look at it, and the fact that this is an anniversary game, it almost looks like some of this was intended by the GDC. Its almost as if they asked the question...

"If you could replay a game, in this case Rack n Roll...how would you go about it? Would you take your own robot from that game and just remake it? Would you take a look at another team's robot that you admired and make it? Would you come up with something completely different?"

Take a look at the designs of the robots this year. We have seen everything from Pink Clones, to Beatty Clones, to Poof Clones and beyond. Some teams essentially said...yeah, we'll just go with the same thing and throw a minibot on it. We have also seen some completely out of the box designs that took some guts and ingenuity to put together. In all cases I salute you!

Now we are half way through the season, and it almost seems like with the minibot, we are going through a micro version of the same questions...

"If you could replay the race part of this game, how would you go about it? Would you take your own robot from that game and just improve it or even leave it alone? Would you take a look at another teams minibot that you admired and make it? Would you come up with something completely different?"

In this case, it seems that the predominant way to go has been the middle case. It leads you to wonder...will anyone manage to come up with case 3...be out of the box completely and blow us all away? I think any team who doesn't at least try thinking about that portion would be crazy. Every little bit to give you an edge helps.

It may very well be a coincidence that this keeps coming up this year, however, no one can dispute that it is well within the rules. The question that seems to be surrounding this is in the morality of the case. Last year we had arguments over the morality of 6 v 0 strategy. I was extremely critical of some teams for using the strategy, and looking back on it I felt that I was wrong to judge anyone for it. Much like this, 6 v 0 was well within the rules...teams realized that, they used it to their advantage, and they benefited from it. Here we are a year later, and we are at yet another moral crossroads. Are we just becoming some sort of moral social experiment?

Its starting to make me wonder.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by Andy Grady

Here we are a year later, and we are at yet another moral crossroads. Are we just becoming some sort of moral social experiment?
Its starting to make me wonder.

Are we capable of thinking beyond and moving past knee jerk reactions? If that answer is yes then I think we could be a part of a social experiment that could strengthen our worldwide communities and how we all react towards each other and with each other in and beyond robotics.

Dr. Flowers' Kick-Off speeches offer glimpses of answers regarding your question, I think.

Jane