Team Update 14 (2016)

[Joseph Smith]

Here's my take on the situation.

An uneven playing field is a fact of life. In FIRST, just like in industry, there are teams that have dozens of big-name sponsors who can afford to build a practice robot, and there are teams who barely have the resources to build ONE robot. And those well-funded teams have worked their butts off to secure the funding and resources, and to keep it every year. Removing bag and tag won't change the fact that bigger, better funded teams will have an advantage. Teams with experienced design mentors and a history of success will be able to make riskier, more outlandish or impractical designs work.

I guess my roundabout conclusion is this: With bag and tag, big high-resource teams will have the best robots, and smaller teams will have worse robots. Without bag and tag, big high-resource teams will still have the best robots, but they will be even better, and the smaller teams will have significantly better robots, but still not at the level of the big teams. Overall, both the ceiling and the floor for robot performance would be raised.

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

Steal from the best, invent the rest.

Isn't that just called engineering?

I mean, we all use the wheel, for good reason too!

[Doug G]

Originally Posted by Mr V

To those that think if there was no bag day that there wouldn't be teams that choose a week 5 or 6 event with the idea that they will finish their robot after watching a week 1 or 2 event are being quite naive.

That would be one way of trying to compete, but I doubt it would result in more teams being competitive... The more likely scenario is you rebuild a robot based on what you see after a week 1 or 2 event before you compete in week 5 or 6. Oh yea, that kind is already happening.

Originally Posted by Mr V

I also think that there would be a few teams that don't decide which route to follow until seeing week 1. In the context of this year's game I could see a team building both a low bar and a non low bar robot and then deciding which one to finish perfecting to take to their event.

Many teams already do this... it's called prototyping. We built a low bar robot prototype and after seeing how it performed, we continued with that design. If it didn't perform, we would have gone with a taller bot. But to do this, we had to stockpile a ton of material and pay for express shipping for items so it would be done in the first week. Wasted money.

Originally Posted by Mr V

Even if the desire is not to copy a top performing robot you can not deny that there would be teams that pick later events to give them more time to perfect their robot, driving and code. It could make it quite hard to fill up those week 1 and 2 events and I believe it would be even more of a problem with areas in the district system.

Are you sure about this? I can't speak to the district system or for events in other regions, but out here in the west, every event is full and teams are having to go out of state in many instances. Look at VEX events. Look up the early events (Sept & Oct). They seem to fill up. Why? VEX teams know to be competitive at the state or national level, to maximize the engineering process of iteration, to get lots of competition practice, you need to compete at several events. The top teams in VEX attend several events and iterate their robots in between. Isn't that a good thing?

So might early events not get the sign ups as quickly... maybe, but I don't think it would be as dramatic as you think.

We need to stop it with this "6-week build season" nonsense... those days are gone. Let's move on without B&T, save some $$, and level the "rough terrain"!

[MrJohnston]

If the goal is the increase parity in FRC, removing Bag-and-Tag, weight limits, etc. is not the way to go. Teams are typically strong because:

* They have professional engineers as mentors that have been in FRC for years.
* Their mentors have specific engineering specialties that more directly relate to building robots.
* They have access to high-end equipment.
* They are willing to really work to raise funds.
* They build robots year-round.
* They have a handful of students and mentors who are willing to commit to insane hours.

If you take a team with talented people, good funding and accesses to all the equipment and, then, give them more time, they are going to create robots that are far more effective than what "elite" teams can already create. They will be able to better take advantage of that extra time than less experienced or poorly financed teams. Example: 1114's crossbow can-grabber last year. Had there not been rules about bag-and-tag and weight limits, they would have arrived at Champs with it already fully constructed -and functional. And no, the vast majority of teams would not have even come close to copying that thing.

Sure, the extended time would help the struggling team to get that "cross a defense, shoot that boulder" routine down. It would also give them some practice time. However, the "elite" team would be working on something that would score two or three boulders and practicing full scrimmages with multiple robots. The deadlines are tough on lesser experienced teams, but they also keep "elite" teams in check. Yes, every team would have a better-functioning robot. However, it would not overcome the design flaws inherent to any team without professional engineers and lots of FRC experience.

If we want to truly create better parity:Look to help poorly financed teams learn how to raise money. Help them to find mentors. Take them under your wing and teach them what you know. Etc. In a nutshell, help them to become better engineers and teach them to find resources. Isn't that what our focus should be anyhow?

As for the thoughts on "copying" other designs... If engineers today never copied proven ideas from other engineers, we'd still be in the Stone Age. Learning from those who know more than we do is one of the best ways to improve. We spend time researching what "the best" teams have done in the past as a way to expand our knowledge base... Our boulder-acquirer came from the Cheesy Poof's 2012 robot. Our shooter came from a Ri3D bot this year. Etc. Sure, we had to modify them for our needs, but that's engineering. Want to support struggling teams? Show them what teams like 254, 148, 1114, etc. have done in past years. Much if it can be found online. It saves time. It saves money. It helps to overcome a certain degree of lack of expertise, etc. (Note: We do have very strong mentors on our team, I do not mean to slight them. However, even they admit, that they are not "robotics engineers." Many work at Boeing, so we'd really have an advantage if we were trying to make things fly....)

[KevinG]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Definitely possible. I watched 836 bring in a ton of raw materials to Chesapeake last year and completely rebuild their robot. They practiced building it at home so they knew exactly what they needed to do.

I was there and it was a particularly awesome thing to see.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

Sure, the extended time would help the struggling team to get that "cross a defense, shoot that boulder" routine down. It would also give them some practice time. However, the "elite" team would be working on something that would score two or three boulders and practicing full scrimmages with multiple robots. The deadlines are tough on lesser experienced teams, but they also keep "elite" teams in check. Yes, every team would have a better-functioning robot. However, it would not overcome the design flaws inherent to any team without professional engineers and lots of FRC experience.

If we want to truly create better parity:Look to help poorly financed teams learn how to raise money. Help them to find mentors. Take them under your wing and teach them what you know. Etc. In a nutshell, help them to become better engineers and teach them to find resources. Isn't that what our focus should be anyhow?

The extended time would drastically help lower resource teams because higher resource teams have more time to work with them. We helped a team redesign their robot starting in week 4 this year, if bag and tag didn't exist that team, that won't compete until Week 6, could be coming out every weekend to practice and we could help them iterate on the design. We could hold more in season workshops and practice sessions, we could help make all the robots and the product that ends up on the field that much better if we only had more time. Right now that dream is sealed behind a few milimeters of plastic for most teams.

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

Sure, the extended time would help the struggling team to get that "cross a defense, shoot that boulder" routine down. It would also give them some practice time. However, the "elite" team would be working on something that would score two or three boulders and practicing full scrimmages with multiple robots. The deadlines are tough on lesser experienced teams, but they also keep "elite" teams in check. Yes, every team would have a better-functioning robot. However, it would not overcome the design flaws inherent to any team without professional engineers and lots of FRC experience.

If we want to truly create better parity:Look to help poorly financed teams learn how to raise money. Help them to find mentors. Take them under your wing and teach them what you know. Etc. In a nutshell, help them to become better engineers and teach them to find resources. Isn't that what our focus should be anyhow?

I can tell you that with out B&T we wouldn't build 2 robots, there saves 6-10K right there each year, because i no longer have to make 4+ of everything. Know what I can do with that extra money?

I can build a decent practice field and maybe get a permanent facility to house a practice field which i can then invite other teams in the area who didn't have a practice bot before who now do because B&T is gone and help them practice and get better.

B&T keeps the floor and ceiling low for low resource teams, I would know i mentored and ran one during college. Removing it will only raise that floor and ceiling for all teams, which is a great thing. A fully functioning and tested robot is way more inspirational than a robot that you built in 6 weeks but doesn't move in 90% of the matches in your 1 and only competition, because you didn't get any true time to test it.

Another thing i can do with that extra money is increase the amount of outreach my team does because now we have a legitimate budget for it.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by nikeairmancurry

I totally disagree with this. Only 51 tried something similar as a re-director into the goals. Others just put up a piece of lexan to keep them on their side of the field.

No one could copy 469.

Just to clarify - we unveiled ours in week 1, 469 did theirs in week 2. We didn't copy anything - that was our robot from the beginning. 469 and us had the redirection idea independently, but of course theirs was much more effective.

Sorry to derail the thread.

[evanperryg]

Originally Posted by marshall

I don't expect everyone to understand that concept or why it is important but it's something we always set out to do... be that by throwing a ball 50 feet, or by building a new robot at an event, or by working with machine learning like cascade classifiers to detect the undetectable, we have a specific goal to do it. It's part of our team's culture and is as unique as our pants.

I applaud your team's creativity. Although it was unorthodox, you acted within the rules of the game and produced a good robot. Playing by the rules to a T requires a good understanding of the rules; getting creative while remaining within the limits of the rules requires an even better understanding of the rules.

My thoughts on bag day: Part of the reason Bag Day is a big deal is because of the "wow" factor. When a high schooler walks up to somebody and show them a 120 pound yoga ball launching monster they made, they're impressed. When that high schooler tells them that the 120 pound yoga ball launching (or tote stacking, or frisbee shooting, whatever) robot was made by a bunch of high schoolers in only 6 weeks, they're amazed. The other big thing about Bag Day is that it helps even the playing field between teams competing at earlier and later events. If you're competing at a week 1 and a week 3, you won't see much of the metagame, and you have much less time to make your robot effective than a team who will compete in weeks 4 and 6.

In other news, I was kinda expecting some change to the cheval de frise besides a change in hardware... can someone from palmetto explain exactly what was breaking?

[Kevin Sevcik]

Oh lord. Okay, first off, 8 pages ago I suggested you guys take the Great Bag Day Debate to a new thread so we wouldn't be doing this in a random Team Update thread. But no, here we are with a Bag Day Debate titled "Team Update 14". Maybe a mod can split the original 10-ish posts posts to a new Team Update 14 thread and re-title this one.

Second, I don't think the question is whether teams can effectively copy a week 1 robot for a week 6 competition and beat the original. Whether it's feasible or not, any number of teams are going to try it for any number of reason with varying levels of success. I think the more pertinent question on this front is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm putting Allen Gregory down as Good-to-Neutral on this. I'd probably trend the same, though I'd be worried about the long term health of teams that exclusively pursue this strategy. It'd be hard to get students motivated and excited in a program that's fundamentally telling them their ideas are always going to be worse than someone else's.

Someone up thread declared that mentors encouraging the wait-and-copy strategy would be the worst mentors in FIRST. I'd point out that, by definition, FIRST has some of the worst mentors in FIRST in it. This sort of thing is going to happen, and we should decide if the benefits of No-Bag are worth these problems.

In that vein, he's my list of pros and cons to eliminating Bag Day:

Pros:

• No more griping/nit-picking about spares and withholding allowances.
• More time for some low resource teams to work on building/programming.
• More time for rookies to see what a successful design looks like, so they don't show up with a robot that does nothing useful.
• More time for veterans to help some low resource teams. Assuming those teams have a late regional and the veterans aren't too busy.
• Less resources spent on buying/building extra robots. Potentially freeing up resources for other teams and resulting in less stocking issues for Vex, AndyMark, etc.

Cons:

• More time working on robots. My wife gets grumpy enough about the FRC season as it is. Taking away the nominal "break" between bag and competition won't help. I suspect there's a fair number of mentors that feel the same here.
• More time for teams to procrastinate. There's still going to be teams that spend a lot of time doing nothing and end up with not much of a robot.
• Large disincentive for attending early regionals. If you're a one regional team, you're NOT going to want to attend an early event. Most teams in, say, Mexico or Australia this year would have a significantly shorter build season than Texas teams. This change wouldn't bring ALL low resource teams up, just those near late regionals.
• More incentive to wait and copy for late regional teams.

57 is only attending a week 6 event this year, and I would dearly love to have our robot out of the bag and out at Katy testing our withholding scaling mechanism and working on autonomous. I'm just not willing to boldly declare that my current preference for this season is an unalloyed good for the whole program.

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by evanperryg

When that high schooler tells them that the 120 pound yoga ball launching (or tote stacking, or frisbee shooting, whatever) robot was made by a bunch of high schoolers in only 6 weeks, they're amazed.

The "we built this robot in only 6 weeks" slogan is so false for our team that I have become very uncomfortable saying it, and we don't even build a practice robot. If you think saying that is a fair representation of the work you have done on your own team, that's great, by all means keep saying it. Unfortunately though, this slogan does not accurately capture the reality of the effort many teams put into their robots.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by evanperryg

In other news, I was kinda expecting some change to the cheval de frise besides a change in hardware... can someone from palmetto explain exactly what was breaking?

That was originally here, but split off to another thread.

[Mr V]

Originally Posted by Doug G

That would be one way of trying to compete, but I doubt it would result in more teams being competitive... The more likely scenario is you rebuild a robot based on what you see after a week 1 or 2 event before you compete in week 5 or 6. Oh yea, that kind is already happening.



Many teams already do this... it's called prototyping. We built a low bar robot prototype and after seeing how it performed, we continued with that design. If it didn't perform, we would have gone with a taller bot. But to do this, we had to stockpile a ton of material and pay for express shipping for items so it would be done in the first week. Wasted money.



Are you sure about this? I can't speak to the district system or for events in other regions, but out here in the west, every event is full and teams are having to go out of state in many instances. Look at VEX events. Look up the early events (Sept & Oct). They seem to fill up. Why? VEX teams know to be competitive at the state or national level, to maximize the engineering process of iteration, to get lots of competition practice, you need to compete at several events. The top teams in VEX attend several events and iterate their robots in between. Isn't that a good thing?

So might early events not get the sign ups as quickly... maybe, but I don't think it would be as dramatic as you think.

We need to stop it with this "6-week build season" nonsense... those days are gone. Let's move on without B&T, save some $$, and level the "rough terrain"!

I'm not saying that waiting to see how the game plays out or copying the top performing robot will result in teams being more competitive, just that there would certainly be a percentage of teams that take advantage of the possibilities that arise from being able to have a longer build season than other teams. Seeing how the game plays and what is effective is just one of the reasons to do so. More time to perfect your robot, driving and programming are other reasons.

There is a big difference between prototyping before you know how the game will actually play in the real world and waiting until you see how the game plays in the real world to start or finish your robot design. Fact is that we all have an idea of how game play will go and what the effective robot will look like and many times is does not how it actually plays out. In the context of this year's game many teams may have initially decided that the 5 extra points for scaling isn't worth it. However if you see that the winning alliance did so in part by having 2 or 3 robots scale each match that is likely to result in teams rethinking the importance of scaling and potentially do something like scrap their high goal shooter for a scaling device.

Yes in areas where a lot of teams end up on waitlists like CA (which is not the entirety of the west coast) all the events would certainly still fill up. Further up the west coast in the PNW District we currently see that the later events have traditionally been slower to fill and we often have to beg and sometimes bribe teams to attend them. That has changed somewhat this year since we adopted the MI system of assigning home events and the fact that 1 of the 2 week 5 events is closest to the majority of teams.

For my team our home event is week 2 and the 2 closest events were week 1 and week 5. I chose the week 1 event as the lesser of two evils, back to back district events or back to back with a district event and DCMP, if we qualify. By the end of week 4 there is a large number of teams that either fall into the guaranteed to go or guaranteed not to go to DCMP. If there was no bag day I can tell you for certain that I would have chose the week 5 event instead and there would have been a bigger battle for those few remaining spaces.

Yes continuing to iterate and hopefully improving your robot and/or strategy is a great thing and is what gives teams what I call the full engineering experience. Removing Bag Day does not further that goal. Making sure that teams can attend 2 events is what furthers that goal. You can then make those changes based on what was learned in the "real world" of participating in an event. Which of course is why I'm a huge supporter of the District System and Bag Day too.

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Caleb Sykes

The "we built this robot in only 6 weeks" slogan is so false for our team that I have become very uncomfortable saying it, and we don't even build a practice robot. If you think saying that is a fair representation of the work you have done on your own team, that's great, by all means keep saying it. Unfortunately though, this slogan does not accurately capture the reality of the effort many teams put into their robots.

Was about to post the same thing. Saying we built the robot in six weeks is just not true.

And is it really THAT much less impressive to say 8 weeks? Or 12 weeks? It is still a huge accomplishment regardless of how you choose to "sell" it.

You listening Dean?

-Mike

[Nemo]

"Copy" is the wrong word.

If our team has a need to upgrade an ability, and we see a concept that works, and we conclude that we can use it to good effect, we are going to try to build something that uses that concept. But we're building our own version of it according to our resources and abilities, and according to what's possible given our existing robot and weight and space limits. We will put our own sweat and ingenuity into it, and then we're going to spend as much time as possible iterating and tweaking and tuning it.

"Copy" makes it sound like a team prints out a set of drawings, sends parts off to be cut, and then assembles a thing according to pre-made step by step instructions. Then tests it and finds that it works just marvelously on the first try.

Edit: Also, the experience of installing this new mechanism on Thursday of the next event and getting it to actually work on Friday is just *glorious*. It's hugely rewarding. Given the choice between going through this challenging and grueling process versus accepting mediocrity from an existing design invented by one's own team, creating the new, 'copied' mechanism leads to superior results in terms of both inspiration and providing awesome engineering experiences.