Robots by committee

[Rickertsen2]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

there is no such thing as democracy on a real engineering project - why try to introduce it on a FIRST design cycle?!

in the real world you always have a program manager or project leader, who has more experience than the rest of the team, and that person has the final say on everything.

As for designing your robot - first thing (that should have been done 2 weeks ago) is to analyse the game, determine which tasks will score the most points, and decide, in priority what functions your robot will have. Our team decided being able to gather balls from the floor and get them to the human player is the top priority. Second is being able to knock the release ball off the tee, third is being able to manipulate the 2X ball, 4th is being able to do the chinup, and last is being able to drag the mobile goal around.

next step is to brainstorm possible solutions for HOW your robot might do each of these things. at this point anyone on the team can toss up ideas - go through the list of functions your robot will have, and come up with possible ways of doing them

next step is to rate each solution based on a number of criteria. Compair each proposed solution to the others, and rank them according to which is the most effective for doing its assigned task, which is the least technically challenging to build and test, which is most reliable, which will be easiest to maintain and repair, which will take the shortest time to design and build, and which is the most versital and functionally flexible

you can do this by having your team vote on all these items, then see which approach get the best score overall.

And, like magic, your team has chosen its design approach. You might have a team leader step in and say that one particular idea is not feasible, or would be too hard to create, and veto that one idea, but in general your whole team will have walked down a logical pathway together to reach a consenses on what the best concept is for your bot.

Once you get to that point, then a lot of responsibility falls on the engineering mentors and the experienced team members. There is not a lot of time for experimenting and learning - it really is necesssary for the experienced people to take the lead when fabrication begins - but by the time the robot is done the new people will understand things well enough that next year, they can take the lead.

I can't agree more. I don't think anyone could describe things better. In the case of ruling a country, a democracy might be the way to go, but in FIRST there just isn't time for such a thing and to tell the hard truth many people on a team don't really know what thye are doing enough to make decisions. This doesn't eman that we exclude them. We have a sort of Oligarchial system very similar to what Ken described, and it is workign quite well.