Here's the problem with the minibot

[Bill_B]

If the GDC intended that the minibot endgame should promote and celebrate the existence of FTC teams, it failed to do that. An essentially watered-down requirement to use FTC (Tetrix) parts only vexed (pun intended) FRC teams about the challenge of LogoMotion's endgame without appreciable FTC involvement. Perhaps the only way to insure FTC involvement would have been to require that the minibot be built by an existing FTC team. It doesn't take much imagination to believe that the hue and cry among FRC-dom would have been loud and long. "We don't have a FTC team in our area!" To which the GDC should have replied "That, my dear FRC, is the point. Go make one."

This is not to say that the current rules did not inspire a great deal of innovation for the minibots and deployment mechanisms. A great deal of the "unfairness" sting could have been mollified by reducing the seemingly immense scoring differential for minibots. So some teams would have been able to abandon mini-bot attempts at the expense of, say, a mid-height tube logo or two by concentrating on making their tube game better.

We will probably never know what the GDC was thinking about minibots. Complicating the FTC picture is the fact that most of the existing FTC teams were already in a build/compete season. They would have been hard-pressed to do design and build work for a FRC team or two in that time period. As good as it might have been for FIRST and for collaboration experience in both FRC and FTC, an effective cross-program promotional strategy seems to be an elusive goal.

Now my FLL team, on the other hand, designed and built a pole-climbing robot of FLL-legal parts in two or three meetings. They got the chance to show their robot to the Hartford Regional audience, thanks to the CT FIRST volunteers, Mike Gentry in particular. I think FIRST missed a good to great opportunity for cross-program promotion, not that FLL needs much of that.