[moderated] Collaboration

[kevinw]

Wow. A lot's been said, and before it's done, I believe a lot more will be said.

As so many have pointed out, collaboration will allow two teams which are at a disadvantage to overcome that and raise the bar. And inspire more students.

But I can definitely see the point at which this begins to fall apart.

Many companies have engineering centers across the world that work together today. Removing obstacles of language translation and time zone differences, I don't believe collaboration is as difficult as some team's make it out to be. It's been going on in the real world for some time, and while there may be a short adjustment period, it makes things easier across the board.

Where's the downside?

If two teams collaborating is good, wouldn't three teams collaborating be better? It would create a better performing robot, and more students would be inspired by the awesome experience. Wouldn't five teams be better than three? What about ten?

At some point it becomes more impractical because it's difficult to coordinate several sites, but it can be done without too much difficulty on every Saturday, even for five to ten teams.

If these are teams with real complimentary abilities (as in Paul's post), that is one thing. However, as teams become better equipped and as more teams are added to the "super-alliance", I see some sort of regulation being necessary - to prevent one "super-alliance" from becoming so dominant that other teams feel there is no point in participating, and students of the remaining teams become uninspired.

I know that TRW has the ability to coordinate several facilities via NetMeeting, video conferences, etc. and does this with US facilities as well as locations throughout Italy, Germany, Korea, and Japan just to name a few. Designs are shared, reviewed, improved, etc. Again, choosing the proper time becomes an issue with time zones, but it can be worked out.

And based on my experience, I strongly believe that when designing a subsystem or component, it is a lot easier to optimize for weight, strength, performance, etc. over a certain period and coordinate with other facilities as to how it will work with the entire system, than to optimize an entire system for the same characteristics given the same time constraints.

I would be shocked if Delphi / GM / Ford didn't have this ability. This is not to single out companies that I expect would be collaborating in the future, but more to mention some teams (or sponsoring companies) that, if they did collaborate in the future would make it incredibly difficult for a rookie team to be competitive against. Perhaps difficult enough to persuade teams to not form or drop out.

It is true that today there are teams with little to no engineering support. But if collaborating continues , let alone grows, I would hate to listen in on the brainstorming and concept generation meetings that these teams would have, as I imagine they'd go something like:

"What about a robot that grabs the goals and pulls them around?"
"What about a robot that collects balls and delivers them to the player station?"
"What's the point? You know we won't be able to compete with the Delphi Super-Alliance, or the GM Super-Alliance, or ..."

Raising the bar for robot performance is good. Inspiring more students is better. But inspiring select students on superior teams with significantly overlapping capabilities at the cost of the future of the competition (and all it stands for) is, in my opinion, not worth it. I don't mean to imply this is what happened this year. I'm speaking of where I see this leading to.

Some people have even compared this to NASCAR. Where all teams have the same robots (because they all worked in the same Super Alliance) and the competition comes down to which students operate the robot the best. This might still be exciting to watch, but I doubt it will still inspire students to pursue scientific and technological fields.