The Robot in 3 Days Challenge!

[Joe Johnson]

Chief Delphi folk,
I am SO psyched to be involved in this thing.

BOOM DONE. is going to build a great robot. By many measures, I have a stronger team of robot engineers and access to better equipment and resources than I have ever had (and that includes the early days of Chief Delphi, which is saying something!).

BUT... 3 Days imposes its own harsh limits. So certain things are impossible just by the clock on the wall. Beyond this, BOOM DONE. is imposing limits on itself that I think will be unique among the 5 teams currently planning on building a robot by Noon on Tuesday (consider this something akin to Dan's Our House, Our Rules speech)

BOOM DONE. will:

• Build a robot that could pass a FIRST inspection
• Build a robot that could be built by a 30th Percentile FIRST team
• Build a robot that would likely be playing after lunch on Saturday

Pass inspection:
Of course, if FIRST requires something on our robot that we can't get by noon on Tuesday, we are going to have to amend this list, but as a rough idea, we'll have bumpers. we'll have a cRIO, we'll meet the wiring specs, and motor specs, and BOM limits. In short, we will have slog through the same crazy quilt patchwork of 10,000 rules that FIRST teams have to slog through.

30th Percentile:
All the members of our team are iRobot folk. We will be working at the iRobot HQ. The team was almost CALLED Team iRobot (until some folks got cold feet at the last moment). If we wanted to, we could almost design a robot in CAD, start with a block of aluminum, mount it in one of our mills and machine away everything but our robot by noon on Tuesday. But we are not going to do that. Our team has spent a LOT of time and energy trying to figure out ways to build robots that low resourced teams could duplicate.

We'll talk more about what that means, but bottom line, we want to raise the bar for the bottom third of the FIRST teams. If we can do this in 72 hours, you can do it in 6 weeks.

Playing After Lunch:
I co-founded Chief Delphi. I was there at Disney when Dr. Murphy handed Woodie the FIRST Woodie Flowers Award. I GET that FIRST is about more than winning on the field. BUT... ...it is my experience that the great programs of the FIRST world almost always build on a foundation of competitive robots. Success on the field begets success in other realms.

So... ...for a lot of teams, a successful year boils down to playing after lunch on Saturday. I want to give teams a road map: Here is a path that will likely lead to playing after lunch.

There is a lot more to say, but that'll do it for now.

Let's do this thing.

Joe J.