Looking Back: 3 Day Robots

[pfreivald]

I think this season taught us that by and large, the Ri3D robots could play the game, but were not optimal designs. I think that's wonderful both in terms of raising the floor and in terms of inspiring better design.

[Andrew Remmers]

I posted this on the Reddit Thread regarding this earlier this week but I figured I should post it here as well.

Build Marathons such as Robot in 3 Days or Buildblitz are raising the bar, not lowering the floor.

See it as you wish, but this is how I feel about the individual programs on their own.

- Andrew

[Paul T.]

at first i thought Ri3D and build blitz were going to lead us towards the vex mentality of "the six bar is the best robot and we'll copy because we simply cant beat it" but i'm starting to come around and here's why:

1. They allow teams with very limited technical skill a chance to be competitive. i knew a good team that went with a boom done design because all the advanced mechanical team members left.

2. They are not the best designs available. There simply a start, unlike in vex with the NZ designs, you can design a better robot.

3. Most teams that choose them will not end up in the top 20%. (have you seen one dominate a competition yet?)

4. In the words of our drive coach " I love the Ri3d designs, without knowing anything about the team, i know the robots shooting sweet spot and how good the intake is." there's a strategic advantage you give up by copying. Teams have to normally scout to determine how to beat you where if you have a Ri3D design its pretty easy

just some food for thought.

[instantcake]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

I think this season taught us that by and large, the Ri3D robots could play the game, but were not optimal designs. I think that's wonderful both in terms of raising the floor and in terms of inspiring better design.

I feel this is the most important aspect of robot in 3 days: it allows rookie teams and veterans alike to get an idea about what to build, allowing rookies to focus on learning how to build a solid robot that will play the game, and veteran teams to use ideas from the robots as a bases to improve on. More robots in three days will give an even greater amount of ideas to FRC teams, allowing the skill floor and ceiling to rise for all teams in FRC.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Paul T.

at first i thought Ri3D and build blitz were going to lead us towards the vex mentality of "the six bar is the best robot and we'll copy because we simply cant beat it" but i'm starting to come around and here's why:

1. They allow teams with very limited technical skill a chance to be competitive. i knew a good team that went with a boom done design because all the advanced mechanical team members left.

2. They are not the best designs available. There simply a start, unlike in vex with the NZ designs, you can design a better robot.

3. Most teams that choose them will not end up in the top 20%. (have you seen one dominate a competition yet?)

4. In the words of our drive coach " I love the Ri3d designs, without knowing anything about the team, i know the robots shooting sweet spot and how good the intake is." there's a strategic advantage you give up by copying. Teams have to normally scout to determine how to beat you where if you have a Ri3D design its pretty easy

just some food for thought.

On your third point it depends on what you mean by choose them. There are a lot of robots who's base was a 72 hour build but they improved and iterated on top of them. I would say 359 is a pretty clear example of this. Their robot base is very similar to the team O-Ryon robot but they made it drastically better. Our team did the same thing, there is very little, almost nothing now, on our robot that is the same from the Boom Done Robot but that was our starting point.

[jijiglobe]

As a New York team my personal experience with RI3D is a little different than what I saw watching other regionals and attending the Buckeye. Quite simply. I don't really like it. A team can build a JVN bot without changing anything and still seed first or at least easily within the top eight. At other regionals you see the higher end of the spectrum being innovative or at least interesting bots. New York has only a handful of particularly strong teams and RI3D helps keep New York teams making competitive bots. At the same time I don't really like how it basically tells most of the teams that you can win just by copying someone else. Some things like the JVN intake are things that most teams would've figured out but el torro and the choo choo are things that most teams wouldn't have done themselves.

[Mr. B]

I help mentor a rookie team that is located 80 miles away from my house. I got involved with the team 3 weeks into the build season. At that point in the season, the drive base was put together and running. And a catapult was built that would throw a ball IF you placed the ball on it and you physically pulled it down against the springs. They had purchased a winch in hopes of finding a way to energize the catapult. As luck would have it we found the JVN video which gave us direction. And yes we copied it.http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/40317 High school students got to see cad drawings for the first time, experiance a neet mechanical device in the Chu- Chu, work with and begin to understand a pneumatic system and compete not just participate. If not for JVN we would have had a drive base and a few poles to play defense with. The team has advances 2-3 years over where it would have been without the 3 day build. No brainer!

[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

I suppose my opinion has been fully formed now that my team's season's over. I've been to two competitions, watched many others, and must have seen hundreds of robots by now. A lot of robots look similar to each other, and a lot of teams have "clones" of Ri3D and build blitz robots, but all of these teams went through a journey to build their robots, and I'm sure that along the way these teams had to iterate their designs. I don't think it's possible to put together a Ri3D/BB "clone" without learning something or having to iterate a part of the design to match your resources.

Not all robots that look like the 3 day projects copied them. Plenty of high performing teams look similar to the 3 day projects, but most likely they prototyped many different mechanisms and through iteration developed their current robot. This may have been the most successful year my team has had, and also one of the most complicated robots we've ever built, but if you strip away the catcher walls, it looks like an 8020 and versaframe version of a team JVN build. (For Reference). I met with an old mentor of mine, and I showed him our robot. His first response was "You guys copied the robot in 3 days, didn't you?". I explained that while our intake and catapult look very similar, the amount of prototyping, designing, and engineering that went into those systems took more than 3 days. I was actually inspired by 2012 over-the-bumper intakes when I first sketched up what would end up becoming the intake on our robot. We did use the "choo choo" mechanism that Aren Hill came up with, but we must have gone through at least 7 iterations of the darned thing before we finally developed one that worked with our system.

I think these 3 day builds have done a great job in helping teams get started and have certainly reduced the number of robots incapable of manipulating the game pieces. Not every robot can manipulate game pieces well, but that's solved by iterating and improving designs, which falls onto teams. It's not necessarily a bad thing that robots look alike. Sure, there's a creativity award, but I think every team wants to field a robot that works, and when there are 6 different concepts that are already presented, it's much easier to do that than starting from scratch.

Building off of this, my team (2046) started off as a RI3D clone, except we shot out of the other end. but what teams didn't always see was our 6 CIM drive, and the efficiency as to which the robot was made. not to mention that we switched to a new collector that collected better, then to a higher angle catapult, and continued to improve. What was nice about the Robot in 3 days videos was that they created a base standard that allowed a team that had never had their robot ready for their first competition of the season be ready for the first competition (and in fact win it), while figuring out how to further improve our robot to continue to be one of the best in the Pacific Northwest (if that's not conceited of me to say; I mean, I am a little biased)

[cadandcookies]

One of the favorite memories of this season for me was seeing a local team that had only made eliminations twice win the North Star regional this year, with a robot that was heavily inspired by Boom Done's.

Seeing them actually contributing and competing was awesome.

[Iaquinto.Joe]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

I think this season taught us that by and large, the Ri3D robots could play the game, but were not optimal designs. I think that's wonderful both in terms of raising the floor and in terms of inspiring better design.

This. I was really disappointed by the lack of iteration upon the Ri3d designs by teams in Michigan. Many just copied or made very little changes to the design, instead of iterating upon the 3 day builds. I like the 3 day challenge, i just think teams are missing the bigger opportunities available.

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by BBray_T1296

I liked the Choo-choo mechanism. Unless teams like us were looking at Simbotics 2008 robot (or people who worked on it ahem Aren), I doubt that many teams would have stumbled across this great mechanism.

I'm surprised Aren hasn't jumped in yet. He proudly tells that the "choo-choo" mechanism was one he discovered when he was in middle school.

The three day robot idea is interesting to me. On one hand I really appreciated seeing some of strategic/black box concepts/ideas/wotnot (such as calculating the "sweet-spot", neutrino made use of that idea and using it to determine ranges). I'm sure many teams benefited from the robot designs as well.

On the other hand it turned me off to watch adults play a "kid's" game. Its not really inspiring to watch an MLB player hit a home run on a little league field.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Katie_UPS

On the other hand it turned me off to watch adults play a "kid's" game. Its not really inspiring to watch an MLB player hit a home run on a little league field.

This is just ridiculous, to call FRC a "kid's" game is extremely disrespectful. We do this for the students but the reason so many of the great mentors we have in FRC do it is because it's not a "kids" game. It's an extremely hard engineering challenge that we give to students. The challenge keeps a whole lot of very bright people coming back year after year to work right along side students to find a good solution and very rarely do any of them find the "correct" solution. If it were easy a whole lot of people wouldn't come back every year.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Paul T.

at first i thought Ri3D and build blitz were going to lead us towards the vex mentality of "the six bar is the best robot and we'll copy because we simply cant beat it" but i'm starting to come around and here's why:

1. They allow teams with very limited technical skill a chance to be competitive. i knew a good team that went with a boom done design because all the advanced mechanical team members left.

2. They are not the best designs available. There simply a start, unlike in vex with the NZ designs, you can design a better robot.

3. Most teams that choose them will not end up in the top 20%. (have you seen one dominate a competition yet?)

4. In the words of our drive coach " I love the Ri3d designs, without knowing anything about the team, i know the robots shooting sweet spot and how good the intake is." there's a strategic advantage you give up by copying. Teams have to normally scout to determine how to beat you where if you have a Ri3D design its pretty easy

just some food for thought.

I'm not going to rate our own team, other than we give it our best at every event we attend.
As Allen stated, we took the ORyon idea and worked from there.
We absolutely love our robot, its performance this season, and in hindsight, with no regrets after winning 3 events.

[Link07]

I don't personally see the problem with Ri3D. It's like every other thing in FIRST: if it works for your team, use it. Just because you would rather not make a clone of robot in 3 days, that might not be in the best interest for another team. Does varying levels of mentor involvement have an impact on teams? Sure, but that doesn't make it wrong. Ri3D is no different, IMO

[Katie_UPS]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

This is just ridiculous, to call FRC a "kid's" game is extremely disrespectful. We do this for the students but the reason so many of the great mentors we have in FRC do it is because it's not a "kids" game. It's an extremely hard engineering challenge that we give to students. The challenge keeps a whole lot of very bright people coming back year after year to work right along side students to find a good solution and very rarely do any of them find the "correct" solution. If it were easy a whole lot of people wouldn't come back every year.

It is a competition aimed at high school students. The challenges are hard, but they should not be mind boggling for a seasoned engineer with experience in the sport. There is no "correct" solution for basketball... but there is a difference between the pros and the high school leagues.

Additionally, the word kids is in quotation marks for a reason. I don't honestly mean its a game for children.