paper: Stop the Stop Build

[kaliken]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Yes. For the following reasons:

1. The practice robot usually often serves as a "beta edition" of the competition robot. Developing one helps you catch issues that can be entirely circumvented in a clean manner on the competition robot.
2. There's only room for so many hands on a robot at one time. Having a practice robot allows for software and mechanical development to happen in parallel. Even with a true 16 week build season, there would still be time crunches where having to development platforms would be an asset.
3. Wear and tear. Our competition robot is usually at the end of its life span by the end of Championship. Our practice robot always in much worse shape than the competition robot. I can't imagine putting that many hours of drive time into one robot.

This probably doesn't apply for most teams. But for a team who has the resources to comfortably complete two robots, it's easy for me to see why they would continue to do so, even with the potential abandonment of the bag.

Thanks Karthik,

You nailed exactly the reasons I stated in the survey on why we build a practice bot. We are very lucky that we have the resources to support building two robots. I know we have at least broached the thought about building three but we cannot justify this even though our programmers would love it.

As for us, we would most definitely continue building practice bots. I know that for us to maximize student involvement is to build two robots, many of our students are brought up to speed on building the practice bot. As a second reason, like industry (at least aerospace) we usually deliver an Engineering model that provides the same functionality to wring out the bugs through qualification testing. We do try to keep the students learning the engineering process typically with design reviews etc. (we are trying to teach something too!)

With the removal of bag day, I can see it being a very difficult decision for teams that are on the edge of capability on whether or not to build a practice bot. As cited above just having one adds dramatic value and in my opinion adds significantly to the overall competitiveness of the team.

I see removing bag day dramatically helping teams that have low resources upgrade their single bot, yet I still see an even tougher decision for those teams that are on the cusp. Basically in the end I still think a practice bot will be required at the upper echelons of play.