Reflection 2005 Season

[Bill Gold]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I like Triple Play in the sense that is forced teams to build a manipulator that worked well and most did. There were not too many boxbots. I didn't like the idea of pretty much only one game option (stacking tetras) but it was good in the sense that everyone HAD to do it well, and they did.

The kit of parts was nice in the sense that now everybody had a good reliable drivetrain so they could immediately start work on an arm, but I think WAY too many teams used the kit provided gearbox. The drive system was the passive subsystem of this game and with 3 vs 3 I think it should have been an active subsystem in playing this game. The kit gearbox is good for getting rookies into this more fairly and it is good for teams with not many resources but I'm disappointed when I see 5th year teams using that gearbox. I want to see a game that makes us strive for a better drive system than they provide in the kit.

But at least the provided drive system did allow everyone to make a really good arm.

Finally, let the robots touch each other. I know safety is key but 6 robots on a small field all trying to avoid each other isn't much fun to watch from the stands. I want to see the pushing and shoving.

Dave,
I think your disappointment with the number of teams using the kit provided gearbox is easily countered with your own words. You seem to be upset with the large number of veteran teams using the kit drivetrain, yet you also say that “The kit of parts was nice in the sense that now everybody had a good reliable drivetrain so they could immediately start work on an arm.” These statements seem to be contradictory.

I’ve commented on this before in this post, and here I am doing it again; you can’t expect every team that has been in FIRST for X amount of years to automatically start fabricating a custom gearbox for either a drivetrain or an arm every year. To do this is time consuming, expensive, and resource consuming, and for many established teams this would cause them to be stretched too thin. You seem overly obsessed with custom drive systems in FIRST. Yes, they can be cool, but they aren’t always necessary or feasible for teams to build. If you want a different drivetrain and arm on every robot in FIRST then we’d have to go back to some sort of system similar to that of elementary and middle school reports, where each team tells FIRST what they’re going to do their “report” on and no one else is allowed to work on the same subject matter. This is most certainly not going to happen. You say you want a game that’ll make us “strive for a better drive system than [the one provided in the kit],” but in order for that to be the case it pretty much means that the kit drivetrain / gearbox would be so useless for the game that had it been left out it wouldn’t have hindered a team’s design / build process at all.

I also think that your longing for pushing and shoving shows a misunderstanding of how the majority of high scoring teams play the games. Hitting is, normally, a tactic reserved for a robot that cannot score. It makes absolutely no sense for a high scoring team to not score for a match and just hit another robot, since all that does is take themselves off of their own high scoring game. In this game it made sense to, after having scored a tetra, play defense on an opposing robot for a few seconds to dislodge a tetra or to mess up a robot’s scoring rhythm. This game was designed for “run and gun” game-play and not “push another robot around the field for 2 minutes” game-play. I strongly believe that fast and massive scoring of scoring objects is much more exciting than a robot that just drives around and 16 fps crashing into things and then switches down to 1.5 fps to push everything in sight around.

I guess the bottom line is that if you don’t think that enough teams are being innovative with their robots, then you need to put your money where your mouth is and be an example to others. But do not make the mistake that innovation is the key to winning. More often than not, the simplest robot is the one that wins the competition. This isn’t to say that winning is everything, it isn’t, but you might want to see how the other people on your team stand on the “best shot to win” vs. “coolest / weirdest new mechanism” debate before you decide which path you’re going to go down.

There's my $0.02

-Bill