A Request

[Justus]

Members of the FRC community, hello. I am writing to you as a graduating senior of an FTC team, as someone who has actively participated on an FRC team in ninth grade, and as someone who has enjoyed following the FRC seasons, matches, and discussions online.

I shall be blunt with my request: Please do not view FTC as an inferior and juvenile version of FRC.

I suppose I shall write about the robot-design-aspect of the two programs, as that is what I am most qualified to speak on.

Now, I could compare season lengths. I could compare team sizes. I could compare the number of tasks per yearly challenge. I could compare robot size limits. I could compare existing resources. I could compare autonomous modes. I could compare number of teams. etc. etc.

However, I don't want to turn this into a war over who has the tougher challenge or who has accomplished more. Rather, I want to point something out: regardless of how tough a year's challenge is, what makes it harder or easier is not really the challenge itself; it's the level of the competition. At a tournament, the hardness is not in the task itself, but in how well you do the task relative to other teams. Also, how well do you strategize? How well do you network with other teams?

I think it would be hard to make the case that, on the whole, the smartest, hardest-work-ethic, most capable kids and mentors are all to be found in FRC. Both FTC and FRC have different aspects that will appeal to different people.

Now, if I had to be honest (which I always strive to be) I would say I think (but I'm not sure of this) that if you were to look only at the most premier of all FIRST teams - the top of the top of the top - you would look to some of the elite FRC teams; you would look to those with the storied programs who produce fantastic machines year after year. But I might even push back against that and highlight one of my favorite FTC robots of all time, the Landroids' 2011-2012 machine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNBwfN6BFuw).

So, yeah. Those are some of my thoughts. I write all this in goodwill, as someone who loves FRC. Thanks.

[Oh, and, of course (movie-type-disclaimer), my views don't necessarily represent my team's.]

[JohnFogarty]

I understand how you feel mate. Just remember the competitiveness between the programs is always going to exsist and a lot of the FTC program feels suffocated by how little representation they get at the World Championship level. I expect with the new venue next season, we'll begin to see this change.

I can't wait to see what happens if FTC World allows significantly more teams in to the Championship now that the site is no longer in the dome. FTC has a much higher competitiveness than FRC in terms of a much larger number of high quality teams. Teams that can win worlds one year in FTC might not even make it back in the next. Even if they win their state tournaments as the 1st or second pick on an alliance.

One thing I would like to see happen...if FIRST could manage it. Is that the FTC FINAL Finals be played on a field next to Einstein. That would truly get more respect for the FTC program that it deserves.


You'll never get me to say otherwise. FTC is the best.

PS. THOSE RUBBER BALLS MADE ME SO ANGRY. (That was also a perfect example of what I mentioned before. My team when I was a student won the SC State Championship that year as the first pick of the number one seed alliance. We didn't qualify for any advancement to a higher level event. **Even if we applied the current advancement system we wouldn't advance to a Super Regional. This is highly illogical and unfair to teams.)

I definitely agree that there are equally as amazing students in FTC as there are in FRC. However from my experiences, unless you're involved in FTC, you never hear about them. I know what the challenge is each year, and I have an understanding of what the FIRST Tech Challenge is, but both the competition and the teams don't market themselves as publicly as FRC and many FRC teams do. I can tell you the most famous FRC teams, and odds are my non-robotics friends can name some as well solely based off of what they've heard from our team and the various news articles about competitions. However I've heard almost nothing about FTC. Maybe there's an FTC-version of Chief Delphi I don't know about, but overall it seems like the FTC presence on this forum is extremely underrepresented. I'd love to see more FTC teams post their awesome robots and robot videos to the forums, as well as grow the CD community to include more FTC teams and students.

[Tyler2517]

I always felt that the challenges faced by a FRC team and a FTC are very different. In my opinion a FTC team works a lot more in engineering mechanisms and project evolution. As a FRC team will work a lot harder with trying to master things like material selection.
My 2 cents. Having larger teams drastically affects how much the FTC teams get noticed compared to a FRC team.

[Christopher149]

I have to echo some of JohnFogarty's and Andrew Lawrence's comments. There are comparatively few FTC teams (it seems) on ChiefDelphi, I don't of anything like TBA for FTC, and there seems to be less spectacle and public excitement over FTC.

And, from what I've seen, FTC robots can often be much more intricate than FRC bots. IMO, FTC is about all the fancy little things you can do, while FRC can often be a struggle to simply achieve the game challenge (though, YMMV, lots of FRC bots do lots of fancy little things and I assume lots of FTC bots struggle).

[JohnFogarty]

Originally Posted by Christopher149

I have to echo some of JohnFogarty's and Andrew Lawrence's comments. There are comparatively few FTC teams (it seems) on ChiefDelphi, I don't of anything like TBA for FTC, and there seems to be less spectacle and public excitement over FTC.

And, from what I've seen, FTC robots can often be much more intricate than FRC bots. IMO, FTC is about all the fancy little things you can do, while FRC can often be a struggle to simply achieve the game challenge (though, YMMV, lots of FRC bots do lots of fancy little things and I assume lots of FTC bots struggle).

FTC has what's known as theYellowAlliance.
http://theyellowalliance.net/

[Tungrus]

May be I have not seen or heard, but personally I would respect FTC and FLL. I have been to World Championship for FLL, somehow we felt it same way as you think. I don't know how FTC teams operate but in my humble opinion FLL team members probably deserve better admiration. They build and run fully autonomous robot to do tasks! Hats off to those team members. Yes, they would have got help from coaches/mentors, but on the field its the two team members and their robot at the competition table. More over too much is expected from FLL teams.... research project, team work, presentation to community/school and what not! And these kids are middle and elementary school.

[Foster]

Originally Posted by JohnFogarty

FTC has what's known as theYellowAlliance.
http://theyellowalliance.net/

Pretty cool, how long has that been around?

There is a VEX forum that has been around a long time. It's a help since it's all about VEX and the competitions. For the FTC roboteers is there an FTC forum?

And I agree with the first two posts. FTC is hard. It's different than FRC and each one appeals to different people. I prefer the "table top" robots since there is more "touch the robot time" with ~5 roboteers to a robot. But I love the fabrication process that is the center of FRC.

[JohnFogarty]

Originally Posted by Foster

Pretty cool, how long has that been around?

There is a VEX forum that has been around a long time. It's a help since it's all about VEX and the competitions. For the FTC roboteers is there an FTC forum?

And I agree with the first two posts. FTC is hard. It's different than FRC and each one appeals to different people. I prefer the "table top" robots since there is more "touch the robot time" with ~5 roboteers to a robot. But I love the fabrication process that is the center of FRC.

Since just this year. It's something I personally was going to do, but then someone jumped on it for which I am extremely happy to see.

FIRST actually has a forum for FTC that is hosted by FIRST for things other than the rules. See here. http://ftcforum.usfirst.org/forum.php

[MattC9]

Keep in mind the FRC challenge has been around for 25 years and FTC has shifted a little bit, I can't recall the exact year but the did switch from FVC to FTC and FTC was just in its baby steps when I was a freshman, back when you could only use tetrix parts. IMO, I say give it time it will grow.

[Link07]

Originally Posted by MattC9

Keep in mind the FRC challenge has been around for 25 years

This is false. FRC began in 1992. This was the 23rd year

[StillDefective]

I live in Saint Louis, and we were actually at Union Station today, and there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that FTC AND Jr. FLL could run there. We walked around the whole thing, and you would have to move half the things in there, and it still wouldn't work. It NEVER could. Even if they, by some act of the robot god, were able to fit 128 pits and 4 fields in there, you would have to go up and down steps to get everywhere, and I don't know about you, but when you have a 60lb. cart and a 50lb. bot, that would suck on day one. It wouldn't even work for a SMALL qualifier. Maybe the Saudi Arabia qualifier where there are literately 7 teams in the country, but not 128 teams from all over. Is this a joke?

[CENTURION]

Thanks for making this thread, I get really tired of people thinking of FTC as "FRC Lite"

It's really more like "FRC Mini" if a comparison must be made.

The biggest challenge in FTC (IMO) is in complexity. Think about the ratio of the size of an FRC motor or battery to an FRC robot. FTC robots are much smaller, but the motors are not much smaller. And by ratio, the battery is huge compared to the whole robot (Same goes for the NXT vs the cRIO, and the motor controllers). So now you have to fit all that stuff, and your drivetrain, frame, mechanisms, etc, into a much smaller space.

Oh, and FTC doesn't get a premade drivetrain handed to them every season

Which I think is actually kind of a detriment to FRC, because a lot of students don't even understand how a six-wheel drop-center really works. (But I guess that's a discussion for another thread)

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

Oh, and FTC doesn't get a premade drivetrain handed to them every season

To be fair though, if you get a Tetrix kit, you get essentially a Lego set with no instructions to work with. There isn't nearly as much machining and hand tools work to be successful in FTC (this is coming from someone who mentored ten FTC teams last year, two of which won both qualifiers they competed at).

Personally, I love both of the programs dearly, but having worked with both, I wouldn't take the time to compare them. They're different tools in the STEM education toolbox.

[ehochstein]

Originally Posted by StillDefective

I live in Saint Louis, and we were actually at Union Station today, and there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that FTC AND Jr. FLL could run there. We walked around the whole thing, and you would have to move half the things in there, and it still wouldn't work. It NEVER could. Even if they, by some act of the robot god, were able to fit 128 pits and 4 fields in there, you would have to go up and down steps to get everywhere, and I don't know about you, but when you have a 60lb. cart and a 50lb. bot, that would suck on day one. It wouldn't even work for a SMALL qualifier. Maybe the Saudi Arabia qualifier where there are literately 7 teams in the country, but not 128 teams from all over. Is this a joke?

I toured the location before I left championships, did you go in and see the large ballrooms? I was able to find ramps to the ballroom from the large areas of the facility, the only area where I had to walk up and down steps was the foodcourt.