RI3D this year?

[asid61]

Originally Posted by IronBenderII

Although I enjoy watching the build, I feel like it dilutes the robot gene pool. Too many Ri3D robots showing up at competition for my taste.

I think a lot of it is just convergence. A catapult with an overarm roller was what a lot of teams used just for simplicity. It might be that a few teams copy them, but I for one feel the need to tweak designs to my liking.

[Oblarg]

I enjoy Ri3D/BuildBlitz and think they provide an important resource for many teams, and have a notable benefit in raising the floor of robot quality at competition.

That said, I think the scale may be getting a bit out of hand, and am not too pleased by the prospect of even more teams doing it.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

That said, I think the scale may be getting a bit out of hand, and am not too pleased by the prospect of even more teams doing it.

How come, specifically?

[mrnoble]

I am, once again, excited by the prospect of the Ri3D type builds. For my team, it was an encouraging factor last year, though their design ended up having nothing in common with any of the 3 day builds. May as well jump in this dispute early: I saw far fewer direct copies on the field last year than I expected, and plenty of variation and adaptation. I'm for it.

[Abhishek R]

I know this topic has been addressed before, but I wanted to add my thoughts, though they probably don't mean too much.

I agree with the others who are on the fence. On one hand, Ri3D may be squandering robot creativity and design - that would be the most immediate observation. I know that on Kickoff 2014, I expected a ton of copies of 1114's Simbot SS. However, while that did happen, there were many variations of it and even more radical designs ranging from catapults to even a certain wheeled-shooter, so I still think there was a healthy amount of ideas out there. Moreover, I think a lot of the teams that appeared to be copies of Ri3D may have arrived there by coincidence - a low launching catapult with a horizontal roller bar is a pretty simple solution to Aerial Assist as I'm sure many teams found out.

On the other hand, Ri3D gives many teams who are struggling a basic idea of what they could possibly do. I would much rather see a copy of one of these robots than an immobile box or barely functional/inefficient mechanism. I don't even know what percentage of FRC teams, especially rookies even know about Ri3D, what with the vocal minority on CD sometimes. In the end, I think it come down to personal opinion - some will dislike it, and some will appreciate it.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

How come, specifically?

There's a difference between having one or two baseline competitive robot designs presented for teams who need it, and having a massive group of professional engineers thoroughly tearing through the problem. I think a lot of the complaints people have about the potential negatives are exacerbated in the latter case.

I also found that the effective signal-to-noise ratio seemed to suffer a bit when trying to keep track of a large number of teams.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

There's a difference between having one or two baseline competitive robot designs presented for teams who need it, and having a massive group of professional engineers thoroughly tearing through the problem. I think a lot of the complaints people have about the potential negatives are exacerbated in the latter case.

I also found that the effective signal-to-noise ratio seemed to suffer a bit when trying to keep track of a large number of teams.

Darn. When you describe it like that, it sounds really inspirational and awesome.

[Whippet]

I support Ri3D, if only for confirmation of dominant strategies. Because of Ri3D, my team was able to confirm within three days that the majority of teams would attempt a shooter. We then built our strategy around complimenting that shooter by inbounding and catching truss passes. Without the Robot in 3 Days projects, there's a fairly large chance that we would have been just another mediocre shooter and ranked very poorly at Hub City.

Inspiration doesn't necessarily have to stem from copying a design. It can also be derived from developing a complimentary strategy.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Darn. When you describe it like that, it sounds really inspirational and awesome.

I don't find watching professional engineers thoroughly solving FRC problems in the first three days of build season particularly inspirational or awesome, in the same way that as a student I wouldn't have enjoyed having our robot made for us by a professional, no matter how good the robot.

To each his own, I guess.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I don't find watching professional engineers thoroughly solving FRC problems in the first three days of build season particularly inspirational or awesome, in the same way that as a student I wouldn't have enjoyed having our robot made for us by a professional, no matter how good the robot.

To each his own, I guess.

That's probably because you're not a student who kills themselves for their team.... and that team doesn't have mentors.

That kid needs every bit of resource he can get, and thinks like Build Blitz are AWESOME for them.

[jman4747]

Robots will continue to look quite similar due to the rules. There is only so much anyone can do differently. And even if they don't look the same most will fundamentally operate the same. I wouldn't call one robot running WCD with belt on vex pro 4in DT versa wheels all that unique from one running colsons with #25 chain. Evidently teams will narrow down to the easiest, most consistent, and cost effective method to play the game. Then you have set actuators, controls, weight, size, battery capacity. It is very hard not to "copy" someone out there. Unless the rules got much looser not to much will be worth doing too differently from anyone else. This is of coarse from the view of lowest cost, build time, and build difficulty for a given performance level. If you care less about these than the limit is infinity.

If there is one area I see realy meaningful advancement in it is code, controls, and sensing.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

That's probably because you're not a student who kills themselves for their team.... and that team doesn't have mentors.

That kid needs every bit of resource he can get, and thinks like Build Blitz are AWESOME for them.

I don't think this year's Ri3D/BuildBlitz provided a significantly better resource for struggling teams than the single team in 2013. I do think it did a lot more to trivialize many of the engineering challenges for teams that have a lot to gain by doing it themselves.

As I said originally, I do think it is a good resource to have (our 2013 robot would not have existed without it). However, I do think there exists a point at which it is too much, and if we were not past that point this year then we were very close to it.

[Woolly]

You know, if there were more RI3D teams, there would be a wider range of bots to copy. In fact, an increase in the number of RI3D bots would allow for low-resource, low-experience, low-budget, and/or low-originality teams being presented with a lot of ideas and having the opportunity to choose between the bots presented to them. They could even design a hybrid of several of the robots and several of the ideas presented to fit a strategy.

[Thad House]

I said this in the last thread, and it is still relevant.

I think how people perceive Ri3D really depends on the type of year it is. For a year like 2014, other then a few odd solutions, there were not too many basic different ideas on how to play the game. This meant Ri3D basically was basically able to show every basic idea that was feasible for the year. Had there been 6 Ri3Ds in 2013, I bet all 6 would have been completely different. And it still wouldn't have touched every strategy that could win in that game.

If the game has a higher mechanical ceiling, more Ri3Ds will most likely be much different, vs a game where there is a much lower mechanical ceiling.

And I for one don't care what Ri3D does to the better teams. If it brings up the floor, and allows rookies and smaller teams to build better robots, then why should the better teams care. Bringing up the floor and improving competition is inspirational and the only thing that matters.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Woolly

They could even design a hybrid of several of the robots and several of the ideas presented to fit a strategy.

You know, some (most?) of those types of teams seem to have the idea that you need to design the robot first and then fit the strategy to the robot. That's one way to do it... but it usually doesn't work out very well.


More competitive robots = good. Playing with and against 5 or 6 poorly-executed copies of the same robot = not so good. I'll give it a couple of years more at least before I make up my mind.


As a note, 1197 did attempt an El Toro last year after seeing Ri3D. Our high roller bar was slurping up balls with no issues, and the El Toro had Issues with a capital I, made maybe to Week 3.