Looking Back: 3 Day Robots

[aldaeron]

At the beginning of the season when multiple "3 day robots" (Ri3D, BuildBlitz) were announced, there was a lot of discussion on whether or not it was a good thing or not to have these televised, "professionally built" FRC robots.

Here is one of the many threads: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=123152

I setup a reminder to follow up and now I want to see what you all think. I am not sure I have finished making up my mind, but here are my initial thoughts.

The biggest thing I wonder is what designs we would have seen without the 3 day robots? Would teams have come to similar conclusions in 6 weeks that the 3 day robot teams did in 72 hours? Would we have seen different ideas at the competitions if there were no 3 day robots?

I admit it was a little disappointing to see some bots that looked identical to what I saw on day 3 of the build season on YouTube at the competitions. Listening to my scouting team describe teams was often similarly disappointing. Some things I heard were: "it's a SimBot with a JVN intake" and "it's literally a Boom Done clone".

I never was able to investigate these teams in more detail in the pits. Maybe they were a small team with limited financial resources and this was their first solid bot that could play the game well. Perhaps they were rookies with limited professional engineering mentors and would have struggled to do more than driving. Maybe this was the first year a team was able to have a robot done by week 4 and actually spent time testing or doing driver practice.

Many teams made clever combinations of the 3 day robot designs, combining their strengths and improving on their weaknesses.

Overall I thought the 3 day robots added to the season and would like to see them come back. I think that releasing all the code and CAD after the 72 hours was a good thing because it gave teams a working example to look at.

My main dislike was that the Boom Done team kept working on their bot and releasing updates during the season (I do not think any others kept working, but I could be wrong). While it was interesting to see their progress, I think that limiting the FRC professionals to a short amount of time helps showcase good concepts, while not figuring out all the fine details of a design for the students. The amount of work these FRC veterans can crank out in 72 hours is amazing and a huge help to many teams.

The opinions above are my own and are offered in the spirit of healthy reflection and debate. It is not my intent to diminish anyone's design or critique how their team operates.

-matto-