"Spare Parts" Rules Are Broken

[TF8]

What about the cases where a team has a practice bot and over the next three weeks drives the heck out of it, developes autonomous modes, and figures out what will break? They then spend pit day fixing what broke on the practice bot on the comp bot and uploading the new code.

[Don Wright]

That's the whole point of having a second robot.

[Kris Verdeyen]

Originally Posted by Raul

That is a unique interpretation of the rules.

It's less of an interpretation than it's a rant on the way things ought to be. I realize that, as it stands now, it is legal to use practice robot parts as spares, I just think that it shouldn't be.

Originally Posted by Andy Baker

In most cases, I agree with your post. However, with Ken's case in particular, you are assuming too much. You cannot just assume that a part on a practice robot was tweaked or modified since kickoff. If it was, then I would bet money that Ken would not bring that part into the arena.

And I wouldn't cover that bet. The larger issue here, however, is one of perception. As professionals, we must avoid the appearance of unethical behavior as vigorously as the behavior itself. How must it look to a rookie, or a even struggling veteran team, to see a mentor on a well respected, well staffed, well monied team leave the arena and come back with whatever part he needed? It looks like it could be a violation. It looks shadowy. Even if you stopped the person, and confronted him or her, and got a great explanation complete with footnotes pointing to specific rules, it looks wrong. That's what we need to avoid, and the only way to do that is to limit what we bring to the competition to raw materials and unmodified off-the-shelf hardware.

[Joe3]

No matter how many rules FIRST writes, a team that builds a practice robot will have an advantage over a team that doesnt every time. No matter what rules they write. Even if they get so picky as to search bags to make sure no spare parts make their way into the arena, these teams will have an advantage. They will have driven this robot, found out strengths, and weaknesses, and found many design flaws incorporated in the robot, and have plans to fix them. Their drivers will have weeks more training, knowing the capabilities of the robot, how in hangles in different situations, and how long it takes to do each task. Their programmers will have had weeks to refine the autonomous programs and create new ones. None of these are against the rules by ANY stretch of the imagination, but they all give considerable advantages to the teams who are able to build the practice robot. Their pit crew walks into the event knowing exactly what they have to do to improve the robot, the programmers simply have to download the new code and check to make sure that it works on the real robot, and the drivers have loads more experiance driving the robot.

As many people have said, the creation of autonomous mode have pushed the benefits of building this practice robot way higher than the cost. It is becoming a near necessity to do so.

Do I think that a team should have a practice robot sitting in the pit next to their real robot and take parts off of it and put it on the real robot when something breaks? Well, actually yes. If I can walk up and ask that team when they built it, and if they say the 6 week build period, thats good enough for me. I also think that FIRST made a mistake getting rid of the 3 day grace period after an event during which a team could make changes to their design. I think that this was a well needed time period for the constant evolution of a design, and the troubleshooting of problems that developed during a regional. If a few teams abused this and worked even after those 3 days, oh well, they can live with themselves. I dont think that more rules are the answer to this problem, as they will always be nearly unenforceable.

It seems like everyone is forgetting what this is supposed to be about. It's not supposed to be a cutthroat competition where everyone is constantly watching to make sure everyone is playing exactly within the rules. We're all supposed to trust each other, and use the honor system, and GP to ensure that everyone plays nice. Let's go back to the system of 2 years ago (teams have until wednesday after an event they participated in to alter designs and make spare parts.) I think it was better for the teams, the engineering process, and FIRST.

[KenWittlief]

actaully every single FIRST team already has a pratice robot

FIRST started GIVING them to us last year

remember?

the EDU bot?

it runs the same code - you can use victors and spikes with it

you can use the same input sensors

you can work out your auton code on it

its not a question of whether every team can afford to have a pratice bot - its only a matter of how close it is to their real one.

[Roland]

A second robot controller like the EDUrobot is a far cry from a second robot, even for autonomous programming. It may be better than nothing, but for learning how to drive a robot, you need something almost identical to the real thing. This is especially important on our team, where we let anyone who wants to drive drive the robot. The EDUrobot is better than nothing, but it's still not really a practice robot.

[KenWittlief]

I dont mean using the little toy motors and foam wheels - you can use the stock transmissions that FIRST gives you and at least make a frame with drill motor or chalupia motor drivetrain, put the EDU RC on it

it will be more or less the same size as your real bots base frame, it will run approx the same speed, have similar characteristics

and you can put gyros and IR sensors and play with auton mode - at least get it close - better that nothing

then tweak your code to match the motion characteristics of the real bot on pratice days at events.

[Rich Kressly]

Originally Posted by Andy Baker

Darnit, darnit, darnit! That was our plan for the Midwest Regional. How did you know?!?

We had this grand scheme to bring in a 727 (747 was just toooo big!) with "TechnoKats 45" painted on the side and plop it down, right in the middle of the playing field. That would've been AWESOME! We were going for the spirit award, but now Dave has squashed our creative idea.

Hmmm... maybe we'll have to think of something else. Phooey on you, Dave!



Andy B.

You both are close, but it's "intuitively obvious" that those commercial flights are rather boring. I'm partial to the FA-18 and/or the Harrier Jet for superior handling and offensive capabilities. That should get the drive team to the field in style.

[Gabriel]

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

You both are close, but it's "intuitively obvious" that those commercial flights are rather boring. I'm partial to the FA-18 and/or the Harrier Jet for superior handling and offensive capabilities. That should get the drive team to the field in style.

Hmm... Sikorsky is a big FIRST supporter and they probably won't need all those Commanches now that the program has been cancelled... maybe they'd lend some out for robot transportation... it seems "intuitively obvious" that it would serve gracious professionalism tremendously to reduce dangerous traffic jams in the aisles by transporting other teams robots by attack helicopter.

[Katie Reynolds]

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

... They intentionally make the rules vague so they can bend them at any time. They claim the rules should be followed with common sense rather than a judicial sense.
Gracious professionalism keeps us all looking the other way if a team breaks the rules. To the point where we'll allow a team to break a rule and then compete agaisnt them knowing they broke a rule. Why don't we tell anyone? Because you're supposed to be GP. If you were to tell, who would you tell? There should be a FIRST police officer, but there's not.
FIRST has been designed from the ground up without a set of checks and balances. There are no consequences for breaking the rules. FIRST just hopes people will be honest, a blind faith if you ask me.

Teams will continue bending and breaking the rules, gracious professional teams will continue looking the other way.

Can you imagine how thick the manual would be if FIRST outlined every single situation, so as to make the rules perfectly, black and white, no questions about it clear? My printer wouldn't be able to handle it!!!

I've never heard Gracious Professionalism defined as looking the other way when someone is breaking the rules. If you see something shady going on, tell someone about it! A judge, a referee, the pit announcer -- someone! There are consequences for breaking the rules. Ask any team that's ever gotten a penalty for something at a competition or disqualified from a match.

It's obvious that FIRST does hope people will be honest, and not try to break/bend the rules to gain an unfair advantage. That teams wouldn't bring a spare robot to the competition to swap out parts that they modified post-build. I would hope the same thing. Maybe it's just me, but I've always held FIRSTers to be people who knew the difference between right and wrong, between cheating and being inventive. Call me blind as well, but I thought the majority of us were above that.

FYI: I did a google search for "Gracious Professionalism" and got over 1,200 results. Scanning over the pages, almost ALL were from FIRST's and team's websites. Seems like most people get it. Or at least whoever writes the content for their webpage does.

[Ken Patton]

Originally Posted by Kris Verdeyen

And I wouldn't cover that bet. The larger issue here, however, is one of perception. As professionals, we must avoid the appearance of unethical behavior as vigorously as the behavior itself. How must it look to a rookie, or a even struggling veteran team, to see a mentor on a well respected, well staffed, well monied team leave the arena and come back with whatever part he needed? It looks like it could be a violation. It looks shadowy. Even if you stopped the person, and confronted him or her, and got a great explanation complete with footnotes pointing to specific rules, it looks wrong. That's what we need to avoid, and the only way to do that is to limit what we bring to the competition to raw materials and unmodified off-the-shelf hardware.

(sorry so long for me to respond - was at the Detroit regional watching some great matches)

Kris-

You are simply wrong whe you assume that our competition parts get modified after ship. They don't. If a part gets modified it is no longer a competition part and on our team it doesn't get used during any competition.

Simply having the part on the practice robot is totally within the letter and spirit of the rules.

At Ypsi we had a student totally rebuild a circuit board because the wires were not wrapped after ship - she never got to see one of our lame practices. We resoldered some PWM cables to a switch in a case where the ONLY thing that was not pre-ship was the SOLDER. We follow the rules and it seems our competitors think we follow the rules (thanks for the kind words Andy).

As to the "appearances" complaint, I respectfully disagree with you. I think you are letting the lawyers win when you start nitpicking about appearances in a case where someone has actually followed the rules. FIRST has so many instances where the thing that keeps us within the rules is our own conscience - my guess is they WANT to trust us and want us to trust each other. Its part of the FIRST culture isn't it?

Ken

[Gabriel]

[quote=Katie Reynolds]Can you imagine how thick the manual would be if FIRST outlined every single situation, so as to make the rules perfectly, black and white, no questions about it clear? My printer wouldn't be able to handle it!!! [quote]

Dean and Co. have been railing against lawyers for a long time, and this idea of shortening the manual and declaring that "words mean what they mean" is a good one. Unfortunately we aren't mind readers and in some cases FIRST hasn't done a great job of making the intention of a particular ruling clear. My interpretation might be different from the judges interpretation which might be different from the authors intention. This problem is only compounded by the number of rule changes during the season. For example, when I read the rule saying that tape can't be used as a fastener, I interpret that to mean that you can't wrap tape around your wheels as a traction device, but at UTC the judges suggested that we do this. The problem is that unless the rules say WHY we're not supposed to use tape as a fastener I don't know how to apply that rule. Dave seems to think that FIRSTs intentions are obvious, but Dave is the one having the intentions in the first place, for those of us just reading through the document they clearly aren't. I don't think its fair for FIRST to expect us to understand their intentions if those intentions aren't articulated precisely. What's so terrible about saying "To keep the challenge fair for everyone we give every team an equal amount of time, unfortunately, since we can't schedule 26 regionals on the same weekend some teams will have more time to work after the regional than others, since it would defeat the entire purpose of having a six-week build schedule teams cannot use the time between the ship date and the regional to work on the robot, the exceptions to this rule are x, y, and z because of the following reasons." The rules don't read like this at all. Dave, lawyers don't talk about simple ideas and they don't make simple arguments, they have to use words in weird ways sometimes because the language doesn't necessarily fit the ideas. Its like talking about "offense" and "defense" in this years game, the words don't really apply to this competition so you have to spell out what you mean by them before you use them or you'll cause confusion. FIRST doesn't do simple ideas either, there's a reasoning behind the rules that needs to be spelled out because nothing in FIRST is "intuitively obvious".

[Jack Jones]

In my humble (rookie) opinion, the parts rules in conjunction with the six-week build; the autonomous mode; and raising the bar have put rookie and novice teams at a severe disadvantage. They put even the experienced teams in the uncomfortable position of looking for ways to skirt the rules as an alternative to failing to make the show. Worse yet, they turn crunch time into a gut wrenching experience. This was supposed to be fun; it could have been better.

I see no way, nor need, for FIRST to draft a set of Draconian rules on the accounting of replacement parts. On the contrary, I think they should eliminate what they now have. Let us evolve and put the best we can muster on the field. Why make a team feel like criminals for not knowing that what they’ve seen was not what has been dictated? Why make them throw away many weeks of effort for the sake of some under observed, unenforceable, and unobtainable principle?

I can envision the parking lots across the street filling with trailers containing the practice robots, assemblies, and other items that we’re not allowed to “bring to the event.” Is that what we want?

[MikeDubreuil]

Originally Posted by Jack Jones

I see no way, nor need, for FIRST to draft a set of Draconian rules on the accounting of replacement parts.

They are not draconian they are suprsingly simple. It's only those looking to beat the rules that create an eviroment in their mind that they somehow don't understand them and can circumvent them.

The rules in a nut shell:
1. If you didn't ship it, you can't bring it. Unless you have the EXACT same part on your robot.
2. Any team manafactured part you do bring must be as dissasembled as possible.

[Jack Jones]

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

They are not draconian they are suprsingly simple. It's only those looking to beat the rules that create an eviroment in their mind that they somehow don't understand them and can circumvent them.

The rules in a nut shell:
1. If you didn't ship it, you can't bring it. Unless you have the EXACT same part on your robot.
2. Any team manafactured part you do bring must be as dissasembled as possible.

Not wanting to get into a debate - but I did not say what they have is Draconian - meant only that I fear they will become that way.

Another point: It is impossible to create "EXACT" same parts. Thus, if taken literally, no replacment parts can pass the test.

So, all of this has us playing lawyer, which is not my idea of a good time!