Robot in 3 Days: Behind the scenes and more.

[Dan Richardson]

Join us 8am Thursday, April 25th at the FIRST Championship in St. Louis for a presentation on our topic below. Hope to see you there!

From the abstract:

We are one part entertainment one part education, meaning that we are usually one or the other, rarely both and occasionally neither. Once a year, with the help of our sponsors, we build a robot to compete in the FIRST robotics competition...in 3 days.
Amassing over 150,000 YouTube views in 2013 - Join the Robot in 3 Days team as we recount the build, provide insight into the process and provide behind the scenes footage and info not yet seen. Topics to be covered are including but not limited to, the planning process, tools of prototyping, blooper reels, design strategies, and the all-important Q&A session with the Robot in 3 Days team.

[Akash Rastogi]

Ri3D was by far one of THE most useful things anyone has ever done for FRC teams. I applaud you and your crew for providing countless teams the basic design aspects they needed to be successful this season. Some teams executed the design perfectly, some not so great but still made their best robots to date, and some drew inspiration from your design. Your videos allowed many teams who have never excelled before to really have a base model ready to work off of and play Ultimate Ascent quite well. Really really great thing you all did for teams this year.

Thanks guys.

[Racer26]

Yep. I hope you guys continue Ri3D for years to come. It really made a HUGE difference this year.

[ykarkason]

The Ri3D was fantastic and awesome, it really showed us a robot that can play the game, and pretty well. It did inspire many people and it was awesome.

Having said that, I do think that it may have done the opposite of what you guys meant it to be - to a few teams - instead of inspiring, there were teams who just built an exact copy of the Ri3D's robot, and that's a shame.

I can say that here in Israel we had something like 3 teams with a Ri3D clone, and that really made me feel that you somehow missed your target.
Also, there were student in pretty much all the teams, that kept comparing their and others' robot to the Ri3D, sometimes saying thing like "that pretty much the same", I do think it comes from the fact the the Ri3D' robot stood by the KISS, pretty much choosing the "easiest" concept of a robot for Ultimate Ascent, which many others also did.

So...
Yeah, Ri3D is awesome, and I really would love to see you guys redoing that for the 2014 game, mainly becuase it's a proof for us that we can go thoughout the build season successfully.
Thanks.

[Racer26]

I didn't see any robots that I would call an exact Ri3D clone, and 4343 built something pretty close. We made tweaks to the design, but as a base level of competitiveness, Ri3D is something to aspire to.

Really, I feel that the goals of the program are met better by a team building an Ri3D clone, than by a totally self-designed robot that is a miserable failure on the field. I find the best teams get their start by borrowing design concepts from the best of yesteryear. Copying Ri3D is just a more relevant extension of that.

[cbale2000]

The best thing about Ri3D in my opinion, is that how much, if any, of the information you use from it is up to you. Our team for instance, was struggling with how to make an effective shooter, but after showing them the pneumatic wheel Ri3D used, we had our shooter design working in no time. We didn't use any other feature from the Ri3D machine, but that pneumatic wheel made all the difference in having as effective of a shooter as we did.

In a sense, it's almost like how some teams work with / are mentored by a more experienced team during build season, except rather than only a few teams benefiting from the knowledge, everyone can.

[Calvin Hartley]

Was this recorded? I really wanted to go see it but I missed it. I guess I should have been more alert of the time.