Crowd Source Robotics

[alecmuller]

FRC is perfect for crowd sourcing robot designs.

Think about it: we have thousands of teams that work at the same time on solving one problem, and we're allowed to reuse design elements from year to year as long as we've shared them.

I love the fact that hundreds of teams have already been sharing and building off each others' designs for years.

For new teams, however (who could arguably benefit the most from building on other teams' work), the amount of information and the way it's organized is overwhelming.

In your opinion, what are the best resources on the web for finding and sorting through different robot module options (especially during the franticness of build season)?

Personally I think the Chief Delphi Forum is an excellent "long term memory" for tracking shared designs, but it's not ideal for quickly finding downloadable tutorials and open sourced designs because it's much broader than just these two things, and you have to wade through a lot of other discussion to find them.

Do you know of people using social media or other tools to help crowd source robot designs? I've looked for groups out there but haven't found any yet (maybe I'm calling it something different than they are?), so I've started one here:

http://www.crowdsourcerobotics.org/robot-modules.html

If others are already working on this I'd love to join them, so I'd appreciate any help you can offer in helping me find them.

Thanks, and I look forward to meeting some of you at World's this week.
Sincerely,
Alec Muller
Mechanical Mentor Team 2342

[tim-tim]

While slightly different, not entirely focused on the tutorial/how to side of things, FRC Designs has recently become the main archiving of CAD files and other documentation for public viewing.

I agree that tons of manpower is thrown at solving the problem (game) each year, but think that most teams find it difficult enough to work within their own team - now try adding the dynamics and organizational differences of one, two, or ten additional teams and it potentially becomes a nightmare. Yes, there are many small "alliances" or partnerships between teams, but to what extent is exact CAD files (or similar) shared? I have no idea.

I do like the idea of getting some tutorials up and running for the new students and mentors, but not sure what the best vehicle is for this. We typically reference the ones posted on Team 254's resources page as a good starting point. Another good mechanical tutorial location is Team 973's RAMP video series, I would put some of these a bit above beginner level from a design standpoint - but easy enough to understand.

I am a firm believer that sometimes the best tutorial for the off-season is figuring it out yourself, or as a team. Find a design problem and work through the process of solving it. Sometimes I feel that following a tutorial on how one person/team thinks a problem should be solved is detrimental to what the purpose of the training. Sure if you want to learn CAD you can follow click-by-click instructions; but if you are trying to develop some sub-system, you may just want to be able to reference how it has been done before. I would be very cautious of just redoing what someone else has already done - fundamental design understanding is very easily lost in this method.

I think I got a little off topic, but hopefully this answers some of your questions.

[alecmuller]

Hi Tim,

Thank you for the links. They're exactly what I'm looking for and your post is completely on-topic - including avoiding the "paint by numbers" trap of too much procedure and not enough problem-solving.

Our team does how-to training for the first month of the pre-season, then launches right into a mini-build season where we design and execute our own game so the new students are better-prepared for build season. We're looking to collaborate with other teams on a mini-build next year and share tips for teams that want to run their own.

Thanks,
Alec