Are the three day builds affecting designs?

[chrisfl]

I am the lead student designer for my team and I modelled our shooter off of a 2008 design and our catapult looks nothing like what we modelled it off of. In the Suffield Shakedown almost every robot looked like twins. The few that stood out had huge targets on their backs. My team was able to create mostly a great design that in no way was like the RI3D robots. I believe the RI3D is a mockery of FIRST and ruins the original intentions of the FIRST program. RI3D makes students believe that they can just copy designs and do little thinking. RI3D really shouldn't make videos showing, in detail, how every function works so the teams that do copy have some kind of figuring out to do.

[scaryone]

Too many clones = loss of innovation

[cadandcookies]

Did they influence robot designs? Definitely.

The jury's still out on whether this is a good thing or not.

Personally, I think saying it makes "a mockery of FIRST" is a very strong and combative statement.

I'll be interested more in discussing this after the season is over.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by chrisfl

I believe the RI3D is a mockery of FIRST and ruins the original intentions of the FIRST program.

Huh. I think these are some very strong words. Personally, I think that having almost half of the teams at a regional unable to score a single point in a game is more of a mockery of FIRST than Ri3D will every be. We're not really selling ourselves as a sport for the mind if there is no competition on the field, are we?

I bet if we had Ri3D in 2011, we may have had more exciting elimination matches than these: http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2011ga

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by chrisfl

I believe the RI3D is a mockery of FIRST and ruins the original intentions of the FIRST program. RI3D makes students believe that they can just copy designs and do little thinking. RI3D really shouldn't make videos showing, in detail, how every function works so the teams that do copy have some kind of figuring out to do.

How exactly are the three-day-build programs a mockery of FIRST? If anything, the sponsors and suppliers that are participating are intensifying the challenge, and giving teams that might not have the resources or time to prototype as extensively as they want to, the ability to take bits and pieces of things that they know work and tweak it to fit what they want. I know my students did that with some of our prototype ideas.

What's so different from looking to the three-day-build robots vs. looking at old games' robots? For example, how many people this year went immediately to 2008 design ideas? They're a great jumping-off-point to work forward from.

This post sums it up really well. A quote right from the FIRST founder's mouth in an interview about innovation.
(The full interview with FedEx can be found here).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you don't like the idea, then don't watch - but it does offer a lot of help to those who do.

[bbradf44]

I used to avoid the ri3d like the plague because some members of my team go straight to that and don't even bother trying to think of our own design. And then we found out we had $0.00 at our disposal this year so ri3d look really good. I like the 3 day builds and think there great for rookie teams and poorly funded teams

[xXhunter47Xx]

Ri3D is great for helping designs. Obviously we weren't going to copy them directly but we took some design and parts aspects and built our robot around it.

[Oblarg]

At 4464, we're using a roller-arm to capture the ball. We did not choose this because of Ri3D or BuildBlitz - the idea was a fairly obvious one, and was proposed independently. That many teams are using this exact same solution is unsurprising, as it is a very good one.

We are going to see a lot of design convergence this year, and I think that's more a property of the game than anything else; aside from a dedicated goalie-bot, there is not a great diversity of differing design constraints based on robot goals. The vast majority of robots will pick up the ball and launch the ball. There are only so many ways to do this, and some of the really obvious ones are really good.

I will say that posting complete CADs of finished robots is a bit much - I think Ri3D is a very good resource, but it should not solve the problem fully for a team to the point where they only need to manufacture and code. I would like, in the future, to see it decrease in scope to something closer to what it was last year (though this is unlikely since it proved this year to be a supremely useful marketing tool for FRC suppliers).

[mrnoble]

So far, my context for answering the original question is limited to the following: my team's build season (including watching videos from 2010 and 2008, as well as Ri3D); the scrimmage we attended last weekend; the local teams we interact with; and the posted pics and videos of teams on CD. Outside my team, I've seen a lot of circumstantial evidence that Ri3D/blitz influenced design, but I haven't seen one robot that straight-up copied their favorite. It's been a hodge-podge, with ideas like the choo-choo showing up on a mini-SS, for instance. Other ideas, like the all-omni drive, I haven't seen at all. My own team went in a completely different direction, but we cribbed the idea from our past experience and some prototype videos from other teams. Even so, I'm sure our robot doesn't much resemble it's inspirations (Ninjineers, shout out to you).

Honestly, I think that three things are true in this case. One, most or all of the teams that show up with Toro Sticks (or any of the other mechanisms) will either do a worse (75%) or better (25%) job of implementing them than the originals, with almost none being exact copies. Two, I'd personally rather say "there goes another Ri3D" than "there goes another box that rolls". And three, this fits the FIRST mission just fine, though in an evolved form.

[Racer26]

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

I bet if we had Ri3D in 2011, we may have had more exciting elimination matches than these: http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2011ga

Whoa. I know 2011 was a snorefest when weak teams played, but how did that QF4 happen?! QF4 = #3 alliance in red v #6 alliance in blue. How did the #3 alliance manage just 12 points in their best match together? The #1 alliance definitely steamrolled those elims. Nobody was even going to get close.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by Racer26

Whoa. I know 2011 was a snorefest when weak teams played, but how did that QF4 happen?! QF4 = #3 alliance in red v #6 alliance in blue. How did the #3 alliance manage just 12 points in their best match together? The #1 alliance definitely steamrolled those elims. Nobody was even going to get close.

That's not even the worst part, just look at all of the qualification matches where either one or both alliances had 0 points. I'm glad Ri3D exists, if only to make matches with no score be a rare occurrence. RI3D has significantly raised the competitive level in our region from years like 2011 and 2012. These projects continue to help teams field robots and learn more about engineering, especially in a region where many teams have little to no engineering mentor support.

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Samwaldo

I personally viewed all robot in 3 day groups as what the "worst" robots will be! They all released alot of info about there mechanisms, so it would be easy to copy them for most rookies and teams. It was OUR job to be better than the 5 robot in 3 days. We have 1 or 2 similiar mechanisms. We knew many pickups would be the same so we built ALOT of horizontal pickups in order to perfect it. Our baseline that we knew we had to better than was the 5 robot in 3 days

I wish this were true but teams in the past have failed to replicate perfectly good designs that were available to them that should have made the game competitive.

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

I bet if we had Ri3D in 2011, we may have had more exciting elimination matches than these: http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2011ga

We didn't need Ri3d that year because we had "FIRST Behind the Design" from 2007 showing the best designed robots for fast aquisition and placement of tubes and most teams failed to utilize this information.

I would love to see a bunch of Ri3D based robots, but there always seems to be a reason* that the best designs when made available aren't used.

* Usually teams thinking "we can do better on our own", not having the facilities or money to build/purchase the components necessary.

[Racer26]

Way too many teams get caught up trying to build something cool that they really don't have the resources for.

This is especially true of drivetrains. Most teams are probably best served by simply building the kitbot drive base and focussing all of their effort on the game specific robot parts.

[nxtmonkeys]

Originally Posted by nxtmonkeys

If not for the RI3D teams, my team (we are rookies) would have had no idea what to do for this year's game. I mean, our best idea was modeling one of the bots shown in the game animation.

Well, we wanted to make the one with the boot, but use a vacuum device instead of a plunger, to add on to my earlier post.

[OzzyArmas]

Originally Posted by Jibri Wright

Read my signature.

Love it!