Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[bEdhEd]

Originally Posted by Dalas

As a team member, I find it very demoralizing that we could perform better in competition by buying a kit and sleeping in than if we got up early to build our own.

If you're sleeping in and using prefab parts, then you may not be using these purchased parts to their fullest potential. As i mentioned in my first post on this thread, my team uses lots of COTS and custom, but we don't sleep in.

Also, if you find it demoralizing that you think your team can build a better bot with mostly prefab parts as compared to original parts, then I recommend your team take the time and pull in the resources in the off-season to learn how to fabricate better than what can be bought. I understand that this will be a challenge, as you mention that you are a low resource team, but the other strategic planning that FRC teams face is in fundraising, sponsorships, and grants, not just a game. Do you happen to have any nearby teams that can help you make parts or help the students learn how to do so?

In the mean time, while the resources are low get as much COTS as can be afforded, and build a great robot. A "great robot" doesn't have to be an extreme performance machine, but rather is a machine that can be a valuable alliance member. How can you use your current resources to be a valuable alliance member? I feel like that question is more important than thinking about how it's built over how it performs.

Great teams don't happen overnight, and it will be a process that can take quite a few seasons. My team never got a blue banner until season 13.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Basel A

Well, if it costs more than $400, no FRC team will be able to use it. If it costs less than $400.. well, that would be pretty amazing. So I think FRC will be fine.

No. You are suffering from a lack of imagination. Once you stop thinking like a current FRC participant, how to do what I described becomes obvious.

Jane Doe's Robot Emporium offers a design(s), and a bill(s) of materials. Each item in the BOM(s) sells for under $400, individually.

Any FRC team that wants to, buys the many items (each under $400) needed to acquire their favorite, complete BOM.

Once all of the items arrive, the resulting pile can be assembled into an excellent competition machine, plus control devices.

If FIRST forbids buying all of the items, any team that cares to, buys N minus M of the items. Where M is large enough to satisfy FIRST's rules. They do some trivial cutting, etc. to create the M items out of "raw" materials like extruded aluminum.

So long as on-the-field performance is the metric that dominates the thinking of many (How many? Most? Too many? Exactly the right number? Too few?) teams, I'm going to predict that this scenario will come to pass.

The question is "When?", not "Whether?".

As the number of teams grows, if the allure of the proverbial Blue Champion Banner isn't radically altered, the number of potential customers for an IKEA-style superbot also grows, and the "invisible hand" grows stronger.

Discuss.

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Dalas

I find it very frustrating when we spend time coming up with the perfect design or cutting the perfect parts, only to find that a team with less engineering experience but more money can buy a kit and defeat us easily.

Why don't you just take the COTS parts into account when designing? If you know what you can buy off the shelf don't you have a solid baseline for what standards you should be performing at? If you know a kit bot runs x ft/s and has y amount of pushing power, shouldn't you design above that? If you know they have an intake that is constrained to work in one way can't you use that against them?

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by gblake

Let's follow current trends to one of their likely conclusions.

I pretty sure that in the not too distant future, some company, people, or person will sell a full, high-performance, does-great-on-the-field, FRC robot (the moving vehicle, the software, and the operator controls). They will sell it in the form of a bill-of-materials, plus instructions, plus published software, plus parts ready to be assembled. They will offer it sometime in the middle of build season.

When that happens will FRC be alive and well? Or will that be the beginning of the end?

Someone entertained the same thought 11 years ago, and I still can't mail-order my Cheesy Poof Powder.

We are closer today (so many different choices of gearboxes, wheels, systems, and a few generic kits), but I think its an asymptotic curve. Besides, I don't think the market for game specific solutions is large (but I suppose only Mr. Market actually knows). While many teams use the concepts proved out by Ri3D & others, (I think) very few copy the drawings.

[sanddrag]

While I haven't yet read this thread, I feel inclined to comment. We here at 696 too have noticed the proliferation of prefabricated parts and mechanisms in FIRST in the last few years. It certainly is a different FIRST than when I started in it 15 years ago. Nonetheless, we've invested quite heavily in CNC manufacturing software and equipment in the past 3 years. While our students are gaining awesome skills while making awesome parts, we've also noticed that it's increasingly becoming a losing battle to compete with some of these COTS parts. I can spend more than two weeks designing and manufacturing a gearbox that costs me maybe $150 and hopefully works like I designed it, or I can spend 10 minutes punching my credit cart into a website to get a roughly equivalent outcome (performance-wise) for $100 more.

While I'd like for us to make everything, like in the good ol days, it's not competitive for us to do so anymore. I mean shoot, we even used to make sprockets from bar stock. Now, every time we order a COTS part, it's not because we can't make it in-house, it's because we've elected to buy time. When you buy COTS parts, you are buying time, and that makes it a very attractive option. This year we've taken a little bit of a different approach of "if you can't beat em, join em" and I think you'll see it in our selection of COTS components on our robot.

That said though, there is still plenty of custom work to be done, and by using COTS components in some areas, we've been able to focus our efforts toward branching out into new manufacturing techniques such as CNC lathe and CNC plasma for other areas of the machine.

Also, learning how to source things from a catalog, configure a product with multiple options, and interpret manufacturer specifications and data sheets is a very useful skill for students to learn, but the offerings from FRC vendors are very FRC specific, and may not provide quite the same experience as working with more traditional industrial component manufacturers and vendors.

Finally, if you buy COTS, and do not do any real fabrication, you're essentially limiting yourself to what's available from the COTS vendors, and perhaps even to FIRST robotics as an activity. Our lab and program is set up in a way that while FIRST Robotics is a major component of what we do, it's not the only thing we could do. With our in house manufacturing capability, if FIRST were to become nonexistent tomorrow, we could overnight switch into building literally any other kind of project. And with how much we've spent on FIRST this year, we honestly could have taken the year off and bought and restored a 68 Firebird instead.

[Rachel Lim]

I believe inspiration comes when you have a bit of success, and then keep trying to do better.

COTS parts can make it easier to get the initial bit of success, so that you desire to overcome challenges rather than just give up.
COTS parts do not necessarily remove the drive to do better, or to learn more so you can improve the pre-existing solutions.

I don't believe COTS parts are bad because I believe they make success, and therefore inspiration, accessible to more teams.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

While I haven't yet read this thread, I feel inclined to comment. We here at 696 too have noticed the proliferation of prefabricated parts and mechanisms in FIRST in the last few years. It certainly is a different FIRST than when I started in it 15 years ago. Nonetheless, we've invested quite heavily in CNC manufacturing software and equipment in the past 3 years. While our students are gaining awesome skills while making awesome parts, we've also noticed that it's increasingly becoming a losing battle to compete with some of these COTS parts. I can spend more than two weeks designing and manufacturing a gearbox that costs me maybe $150 and hopefully works like I designed it, or I can spend 10 minutes punching my credit cart into a website to get a roughly equivalent outcome (performance-wise) for $100 more.

While I'd like for us to make everything, like in the good ol days, it's not competitive for us to do so anymore. I mean shoot, we even used to make sprockets from bar stock. Now, every time we order a COTS part, it's not because we cahttp://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/editpost.php?do=editpost&p=1530202n't make it in-house, it's because we've elected to buy time.

Precisely. The only way to compete with the highly advanced COTS parts is to manufacture year round because that's exactly what the COTS part supply chain is doing.

Once you add the students learning into the equation it's no longer even a CNC fabrication problem. You need to teach them how to use the machine so now they need to go year round. That education alone on an advanced CNC machine could consume all of the 6 week build easily.

Sooner or later - the top teams that used to show exceptional levels of fabrication will no longer be able to avoid rampant COTS purchases unless they are a year round vocational school. This is already the case with the FRC control system. Even if you can fabricate that (Team 221 for example) you can't legally use it in the FRC competition.

We are on the same page. I had this exact revelation when Team 11 got their HAAS CNC mill and lathe. This again is why I am trying hard to setup a Makerspace. Simply put: we can't turn out the sort of fabrication I think people want us to turn out without committing to resource access year round such that when the build starts the students are basically already trained operators with a task. I can see how other manufacturing heavy places can manage this - they can bring the students to their workplaces and bootstrap them off that apprenticeship any time during the year. Let's be fair: NJ as a State is not known as the being a machine manufacturing powerhouse anymore (there are some exceptions but not enough). So if we can't introduce the skills as a byproduct of the local industry then we can serve the interest by merely providing access and letting curiosity do the rest.

In the end, however, I see the inevitable coming. Adults and business people squeezing the competition until there are more consumers and less fabricators. FIRST FRC just needs to adapt if they are not okay with it and personally I don't think we should be entirely okay with all that means. My only solace in all this is that if this is allowed to run unchecked my personal goal to mentor and help my community is unaffected because I don't care if we win the competition personally (I know some people even on my team will not agree with this, that's fine). I don't have to rely on Team 11/193 to fund my Makerspace concept. I now own 3 FRC robots personally: 2 AM14U2 chassis and a custom one. I have my own small and portable CNC tools I can offer. When the students come looking with the necessary curiosity the resources are there cause for me that's what this is about. I don't care who wins FRC: I care that my students can achieve unhindered by obstacles put in place with the very same consumerism that created FRC in the first place when we drove manufacturing offshore exploiting underpaid labor. I have been around FRC for 20 years so I remember the ideals when it was U.S. FIRST. I am glad we became global but global is still a village of villages. This is my village, they got me where I am, now I owe them some favors in return even if some people don't get it or even understand it.

[Joe Johnson]

What are people afraid of here, really? That we have teams buying their way to a competitive robot? Really? This is the problem with FIRST that keeps you up at night?

Specialized COTS parts enable better robots? Indisputable. That they lesson the FIRST experience for most (or even many) teams? I see no evidence of this.

AND I see the opposite actually.

Specialized COTS parts allow things that are just not possible for the vast majority of teams for pretty much any team that can fund raise a few hundred extra bucks. Is that really that bad of a thing? If I am a lower middle of the road team and I want to have shifting transmissions next year what are my options? I can spend a ton of time and energy trying to design my own (and probably failing) or I can order a tried and true solution from AndyMark or VexPro or others. I just don't see this as a problem.

/begin old man rant/
FIRST has always been one where a team could effectively buy a competitive robot if that was their goal. With enough dough, a team could effectively have a professionally designed and build robot that their kids had almost no input into designing & building.

On the Continuum of Inspiration, I suppose this is too far to one side. Just as I think that letting kids spend 1000's of hours on an arm only to watch it spin in circles all match because FIRST gave them a horrible hack for a drive system (e.g. a drill a trantorque where a chuck should be) is too far to the other.

I seriously doubt that we will ever get to the point where you can order a competitive robot in a kit but we can cross that bridge when we get to it. I still see way too many teams struggling to get a robot to play the game at all to lose any sleep over this dystopian FIRST vision.

Also... ...GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
/end old man rant/

Dr. Joe J.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

LOL!

[Sunshine]

90%+ of all the people responding are agreeing with each other. It goes back to what I said 7 pages ago. Different strokes for different folks. It's all about the evolution of the individual team and how far mentors can/want to take them.

The majority of our kids on my team are in an engineering academy with access to CNC mills and lathes. They have a few 3D printers to play with and a plasma cutter. The juniors and seniors have the experience and background to make our needed parts. Their experience will be different than other teams.

Then I remember the students I have met at competition who are from some big city schools. Their mentors have different priorities. Their goals include keeping the kids off the streets, keeping them fed. Keeping them away from the gangs. They don't have the facilities that I have access to. Sadly, they do not have the financial resources either. Do I have a problem with them using more COTS than us? Nope. Are they doing it right? Yup. Are we doing it right? Yup. Are all of you doing it correctly? Yup.

We're all doing what we think are best for our students. Some are ready for higher level goals and sophisticated challenges. Others will see success by the simple things like learning ohms law or how to wire without frying anything. Take 'em as far as you can and keep 'em excited about learning. Then we are all winners. It's really not about what happens on the field. It's about the journey getting to the field.

[MrJohnston]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

I seriously doubt that we will ever get to the point where you can order a competitive robot in a kit but we can cross that bridge when we get to it. I still see way too many teams struggling to get a robot to play the game at all to lose any sleep over this dystopian FIRST vision.
Dr. Joe J.

That's just it: We are at that point. That is why some of us are in this discussion. Check out the advertisement. The only thing missing is the price - which you can get by calling.

http://www.wcproducts.net/mcc2016/

[Dalas]

Originally Posted by bEdhEd

Also, if you find it demoralizing that you think your team can build a better bot with mostly prefab parts as compared to original parts, then I recommend your team take the time and pull in the resources in the off-season to learn how to fabricate better than what can be bought. I understand that this will be a challenge, as you mention that you are a low resource team, but the other strategic planning that FRC teams face is in fundraising, sponsorships, and grants, not just a game. Do you happen to have any nearby teams that can help you make parts or help the students learn how to do so?

In the mean time, while the resources are low get as much COTS as can be afforded, and build a great robot. A "great robot" doesn't have to be an extreme performance machine, but rather is a machine that can be a valuable alliance member. How can you use your current resources to be a valuable alliance member? I feel like that question is more important than thinking about how it's built over how it performs.

Great teams don't happen overnight, and it will be a process that can take quite a few seasons. My team never got a blue banner until season 13.

Thank you for the advice, and we will do our best to reach out to other teams in the off-season. Utah isn't exactly a hotbed of robotics activity, but I'm sure we can find someway to collaborate. As for the business and fundraising side of things, I'm only the design guy for our team so I don't have many skills in that region. As for trying to be valuable for an alliance, one of the reasons I'm so salty about the MCC is it does virtually everything we were planning on doing to be valuable in an alliancen.

Originally Posted by IronicDeadBird

Why don't you just take the COTS parts into account when designing? If you know what you can buy off the shelf don't you have a solid baseline for what standards you should be performing at? If you know a kit bot runs x ft/s and has y amount of pushing power, shouldn't you design above that? If you know they have an intake that is constrained to work in one way can't you use that against them?

We do. I'm not bashing against all COTS parts, which as I said before have been key for many years in helping us get a functional robot out. I only dislike game-specific solutions that require little to no thought from a team. Most COTS parts make it easier to build the best robot that you can design. The MCC from WCP gives a competitive robot with no thinking involved.

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

Specialized COTS parts allow things that are just not possible for the vast majority of teams for pretty much any team that can fund raise a few hundred extra bucks. Is that really that bad of a thing?

No, it's not that bad of a thing. I agree that the majority of COTS parts are a mostly positive development for an individual team, as well as preparing team members for a future in engineering where many parts can be COTS.

Originally Posted by Sunshine

90%+ of all the people responding are agreeing with each other.

I agree.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

What are people afraid of here, really? That we have teams buying their way to a competitive robot? Really? This is the problem with FIRST that keeps you up at night?

Not really. The problem is that when your competitors can get a robot that was designed over years with no respect for the build times with much less investment of their time. You no longer can compete if you fabricate yourself unless you literally also design what you are making over years. Basically you are foolishly following a 'rule' to the letter when your competitors are not really doing so.

So yes this allows other teams to be competitive. In fact it allows them to be more than competitive. It allows them to raise the bar so high that a six week build season is not even relevant any more. That same six week build season we keep telling people is the holy grail of keeping things even.

If this was not actually an issue I bet FIRST would not even exist. It came up often in the early days. Eventually the next goal will not just be to make it COTS. It will be to drive down the cost by any means because that's the only barrier. Then, as you see today already, you'll make the parts anywhere you can get cheap labor and shipping which is making this stuff anywhere but in your neck of the woods for a lot of people in FIRST.

So yes it drives the competition but it erodes a fundamental. Maybe we just don't care about that any more. Maybe some of us are just relics of an old sales pitch. If so that's fine.

The fact that we want to pretend that the only way to address this is to block COTS is as much the issue.
We can also go positive and just reward when the FIRST teams use less COTS as a special case and separate award - and let the competition field decide if the resulting robot is competitive against COTS.
Maybe some years it will be, maybe not, at least as long as the game each year remains secret it will block perfect matches from multi-year COTS builds.
Oh wait the market has recently floated letting the supply side know the game early - how early? Like a year or so ahead?
Surely the suppliers wouldn't build perfect COTS parts for 1 year once they know the game early.
I mean it's not like a very particular drive train element (ahem treads) would just appear at the start of a game that fits it perfectly!
No that would never happen.

Sooner or later this is going to be exactly like FTC before it. Does that actually surprise anyone really considering where FTC fits between FLL and FRC? The only difference will be a larger field and bigger robots.

[GreyingJay]

In reading this thread I am also reminded that having an awesome robot is only one small piece of the puzzle.

So you buy a great COTS robot. You put it together with a single 9/16" wrench. Awesome. Time to go win a regional?

Of course not. There's so much other stuff to do. Develop a great drive team. Write the software to make the robot move. Now write the software to optimize it, give driver feedback, do autonomous modes, etc. Learn to take apart and fix every bit of the robot inside a cramped space with limited tools and not enough time. Go get some more sponsors. Plan fundraisers. Do a robot reveal video. Do your chairman's video...

We have a long to-do list between now and our first regional...

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by GreyingJay

In reading this thread I am also reminded that having an awesome robot is only one small piece of the puzzle.

So you buy a great COTS robot. You put it together with a single 9/16" wrench. Awesome. Time to go win a regional?

Of course not. There's so much other stuff to do. Develop a great drive team. Write the software to make the robot move. Now write the software to optimize it, give driver feedback, do autonomous modes, etc. Learn to take apart and fix every bit of the robot inside a cramped space with limited tools and not enough time. Go get some more sponsors. Plan fundraisers. Do a robot reveal video. Do your chairman's video...

We have a long to-do list between now and our first regional...

Yes we agree on this and I pointed that out previously as well.
The question isn't really whether there's anything left to do.
The question is whether what we took off was valued at all by FIRST FRC.