My wish? make the BuildBlitzs/RobotIn3Days projects go away...

[uggmun]

Originally Posted by Leav

The marathons are probably going to stifle the creative process. If teams choose to watch they can easily be locked on an idea and be unable to shake it from their mind.

This is exactly how I feel now. My friend and I came up with a conveyor-belt loader and slingshot design that worked in our mockups, but our robot this year is going to be a knockoff of the Boom Done and Andymark designs. I'd much rather have a student design that works poorly than a carbon copy that performs magnificently.

[KeeganP]

Originally Posted by uggmun

This is exactly how I feel now. My friend and I came up with a conveyor-belt loader and slingshot design that worked in our mockups, but our robot this year is going to be a knockoff of the Boom Done and Andymark designs. I'd much rather have a student design that works poorly than a carbon copy that performs magnificently.

We've been having some discussions on the whole Ri3D and BuildBlitz teams in another thread (link). There's a general consensus there that Ri3D and BB increase the overall level of play for FRC, but the question of how Ri3D and BB should change for next year remains.

Personally, I agree that I would rather have my team build a fully original design than copy another, but I don't want Ri3D and BB to go away. Rather, I'd like to see them wait until after the season to release CAD models and in-depth videos. They're incredible machines that I'd love to learn from, but perhaps after the season is over so the creativity of the robot design (though possibly similar) can be "owned" by the teams themselves.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by uggmun

This is exactly how I feel now. My friend and I came up with a conveyor-belt loader and slingshot design that worked in our mockups, but our robot this year is going to be a knockoff of the Boom Done and Andymark designs. I'd much rather have a student design that works poorly than a carbon copy that performs magnificently.

Then it seems like you have prioritized original design over competitive success, and that's fine. However, that means the BuildBlitz/Ri3d projects aren't for you. You don't have to watch them, but it seems like the rest of your team picked simple, elegant, and competitive.

I think these projects are great, as has been said a million times before - to help bring up the level of play for teams. Having been a student captain on a rookie team when there weren't projects like this, I can tell you right now we'd have been much more competitive, much earlier in our time as a team if we'd had things to base off of. Instead, it took us 3 years of being that laughable, non-performing, bottom-ranked robot to finally get close-up enough with other teams to get a better idea of how the good teams design & build. It wasn't inspirational at all. In fact, 1923 almost didn't get to continue beyond year 2 because of how poorly we were doing.

I'd much rather see Build Blitz/Ri3d copies than a field full of rookie boxbots that can't accomplish anything. The strong teams will still stand out, and the less-than-strong teams will get the leg up that they need.

If you disagree, then it's your choice not to watch the streams, and it's your choice to build something different. However, you don't need to campaign to take away an opportunity from other parts of the community that might want to use it.

[jimwick]

We have been paying close attention to the robot in three days project and our bot is quite similar to one of them. We have been feeling guilty about this.

BUT
recently we have started to re-engineer a number of systems to make them simpler, more efficient, and easier to build with the parts we have on hand. (Not willing to rely on order from AM or VexPro at this point in season.)

So in the end quite a bit of good engineering is being done, and that's the point. So we're feeling a lot better about the 3-day thing.

[uggmun]

It wasn't exactly a rant towards the Ri3D program as it was towards my team's rationale.

Originally Posted by Libby K

it seems like the rest of your team picked simple, elegant, and competitive.

Not exactly, what they picked was "safe". I would understand copying an Ri3D robot if you're a first year rookie team, but our team has had two robotics competitions under its belt. If we are going to advance beyond our current position, we need to innovate beyond rescaling Ri3D designs to fit on our chassis. We've had plenty of innovative designs suggested within the team. The problem is that my team fears taking risks, so we take the "safe" route.

[Kernaghan]

In the most respectful way possible, I completely disagree.

Watching experienced FIRSTers and skilled mentors show ways to initially tackle a task and then blaming them for stealing creativity is kind of like saying: "I'm never going to be an inventor because so many things have already been invented".

Just look at some of the greatest inventions of mankind, basic concepts and ideas were taken, then added upon, revolutionizing the world.

Watching JVN's design shoot the ball from 15ft completely opened the idea to our team that shooting the ball from 20ft was not outside the realm of possibility, thus inspiring us to be more CREATIVE.

Thank you Ri3D and BuildBlitz!

[thefro526]

For what it's worth, there's not a single thing wrong about copying a concept from any, or all of the RI3D Teams and/or BuildBlitz Teams. Heck, if someone wanted to, they could build a replica of any of those machines to a reasonable degree of accuracy, and I still don't see all that much of an issue with that.

The problem isn't copying someone's design, or 'finding' design inspiration from their results. The problem is copying those machines without learning from them, or trying to make something better, or more efficient or even just making it look cooler. There's a massive amount to be learned from reverse engineering someone's design, even if the completed CAD model is published - all the person copying the design has to do is ask 'why?'. Why did they use this? Why did they do that? Along the way, I'd wager that the person copying would learn a heck of a lot more than one would think.

When I first started in FRC, my team (816 at the time) was routinely in the bottom 25% of performers at almost every on-season event we went to. Initially, we seemed to have this unjustified ego about our design, or our method, believing that because it was something original, and not built by engineers, that our mediocre performance was some how validated. In those first few seasons, I learned a lot, but not a lot about how to do things the 'right way', more of how not to do things, or how not to handle myself.

Once I became an upperclassman and had both the respect and support required to 'try something different' I drew inspiration from machines that I'd seen that were successful in one way or another. I'd look through old robots, study old designs, and try to find something that I could 'borrow' for my own needs. In doing so, I limited the failure points of the design down to our execution, but not the overall concept. In 2008, and 2009, our machines were heavily inspired by those that we had seen in 2006 and 2007 and also machines found on the internet from 2002 and earlier. Both of those machines (2008 and 2009) were arguably the two most effective machines that the team had ever built until that time, and we always were quick to admit that 'all we did was take a bunch of things that worked for other people and re-purposed them'.

When I became a mentor on 816, I continued to teach students that there was nothing wrong in drawing inspiration from someone else's results, as long as you do something to make it better, or your own - and you learn from the experience in the process. The last two robots 816 built while I was still a mentor are perfect examples of this - the 2011 robot was heavily inspired by 1902 2007 and 148 in the same year and the 2012 machine was for all intents and purposes a 'copy' of 254 / 968 in 2006. By drawing inspiration from proven machines, it made it so much easier to focus on the problem at hand - successfully executing whatever we chose to do in the 6 week period of build season, and to inspire and learn during the process. I can only imagine what would have happened had we chosen to go it alone and do something 'different' as we had done in my first two years....

Anyway, back to the topic of RI3D and BuildBlitz - in the last two years, these have been an absolutely Amazing resource to reference as a baseline, especially considering how unique 2013's challenge was (historically) and how critical robot to robot interaction is going to be this year. Yes, these robots do cut down on some of the 'different' designs we see each year, but I would imagine that many of those 'different' designs are replaced by machines that are going to be much more likely to complete the game objective, and more than likely, inspirational.

I look at my old team, who essentially built an RI3D 'clone' in 2013 after some major leadership changes happened between the 12 and 13 seasons, and I honestly believe that it was the best decision they could have made. Their robot wasn't amazing, or super competitive, but it could score, it could drive well, and they obviously had faith in it. After seeing them make it to the finals, once on-season and once off-season, I can assure you that each student on that team was inspired in one way or another by that robot - even if it was just a copy of another.

[Pault]

Originally Posted by uggmun

It wasn't exactly a rant towards the Ri3D program as it was towards my team's rationale.



Not exactly, what they picked was "safe". I would understand copying an Ri3D robot if you're a first year rookie team, but our team has had two robotics competitions under its belt. If we are going to advance beyond our current position, we need to innovate beyond rescaling Ri3D designs to fit on our chassis. We've had plenty of innovative designs suggested within the team. The problem is that my team fears taking risks, so we take the "safe" route.

I'm not on your team, so I don't know that much about the exact situation, but have you ever tried looking at it from their point of view. You say that your team "fears taking risks," but maybe they see it as "building within our resources," or "keeping it simple," or "maximizing driving and tweaking time." Like I said, I'm don't know your team, so maybe you really do have the capacity to build some crazy awesome robot. But maybe your team thinks that they don't, and that's why they want to stick with something they know will work. I definitely believe that there are many veteran teams who don't have the capabilities to build more than a Ri3D/BB bot.

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by uggmun

It wasn't exactly a rant towards the Ri3D program as it was towards my team's rationale.

Not exactly, what they picked was "safe". I would understand copying an Ri3D robot if you're a first year rookie team, but our team has had two robotics competitions under its belt. If we are going to advance beyond our current position, we need to innovate beyond rescaling Ri3D designs to fit on our chassis. We've had plenty of innovative designs suggested within the team. The problem is that my team fears taking risks, so we take the "safe" route.

My team's been around for 9 years with 18 events behind us- and we're still taking bits of pieces of things we like from Build Blitz & Ri3D concepts.

I think it's made our season go a lot smoother so far - we are NOT copying, but we've seen what's possible and are improving on it from there, where we might not have been able to do that in previous seasons & would have spent six weeks just getting to a point of 'eh, it's okay'.

Your mileage may vary, but I think teams are gaining a lot of help from this more than they're being stifled. The point isn't to have something to copy and create, and finish your build season early- it's to have a new jumping-off point that isn't 'oh god, how does this game even work?!' so you can spend the rest of your build season improving.