Reflection 2005 Season

[sanddrag]

In this year's kickoff it looked like autonomous was supposed to be easier than ever. Yet probably less teams attempted anything or came up with anything sucessful than in year's past. I don't know what it is going to take from FIRST to get teams to have a good autonomous. I would say it might take sticking with the same setup for a few years (and announcing the setup before build season) but I'm not confident the current setup (camera) will be given a second run with the lack of success. So we will have something new again. Maybe they can still announce what it will be or give us the parts in a preseason kit.

I think next year they will need to add some sort of HUGE scoring/points bonus for doing stuff in autonomous mode in order to get everyone to do it. I think slowly FIRST is trying to move towards an all autonomous competition but our progress so far in the whole scheme of things can be described as not quite as expected.

[Barry Bonzack]

The season is over?

[Ryan Albright]

As my first year of not being a student i learned alot. I learned there is so much more then what happens on the field. With not having to worry about a team this year i got to sit back and watch each team do what they do best. I saw teams drop what they were doing with there robot and go help another team with a non working robot. I saw teams take safety into there own hands and make sure everyone had safety glasses. I saw what it took behind the scenes to actually make one of these competitions work. I enjoyed volunteering and meeting the people that i did and i cant wait till next year and they start asking for volunteers becuase i am ready to sign up again

[Bcahn836]

I said that I would post me response later so here goes.

This year's game I think was pretty challenging, it forced teams to come up with innovative designs in arm systems which my team is starting to get the hang of, and our programing team stepped it up this year and won us an award.

This season we learned to go for it all. Last year we unfortunately decided that capping and uncapping goals would be more important than hanging from the bar. This years game taught us to not design a robot based on alliances, because you can't always depend on your teammate to make up for your robots weaknesses. This year also taught us that nothing design wise is out of our reach. Next year I hope we have a game that really demands a good strong drive train, because that is probably our weak point, compared to other veteran teams.

My final thoughts of this season are good. This season really helped my team as well as others to venture out and try something different. This is our forth year and the second year we have used pneumatics. We have usually abandoned the idea of pneumatics because of their trade offs and we usually used motors for our arm systems. I think that this season was my teams best, for us it isn't all about winning a competition but it is about teaching the morals of FIRST and Engineering.

[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

The kit transmission was very close to what 639 would've machined. So we used it.

[E. Wood]

This season, being my first, would have been amazing anyways. What made it even better is that FIRST is different than any other organization out there. I never thought that a competition as expensive as FIRST could be as friendly as it is. One second a team can be your fiercest opponent, and then the next they can be your greatest ally. The amount of help that other teams are willing to give to teams in trouble is absolutely amazing and is a wonderful experience for both teams involved (my team both received (thanks guys) and gave help during our regional). The other thing that is cool about FIRST is the atmosphere of the competitions. Each regional I went to was a fierce competition, a party, and a school all at the same time. I have learned more in the few short months of the build season and at the competition than I ever have in any other organization. At first, after hearing about the build season and just how large the competitions were, I thought that would be lost. However, with help from other teams and FIRST, I felt right at home. Now, if I could, the only thing I would do would be robotics.

My team and I had a remarkable season this year and really learned a lot. Needless to say Team 1629 will be back next year.

[Justin Boudreau]

This season has just been amazing for me.

Our team really came into its own this year. We were done our robot ahead of schedule, and a full twenty pounds under-weight. We were able to come up with the funds to attend two competitions, and then we managed to be more succesful at those regionals than we even thought possible. (We ended up qualifying for the Championship 4 times!)

All that aside, what really stands out when I look back over the past couple months, are the good times I shared with my team-mates, and all of the truly amazing people I have met through FIRST.

This may be my final year as a student, but it definately won't be my last year participating in FIRST.

[John Gutmann]

this year i once again saw the importance of mentors, they make first teams stick together and support and teach students all the way; you could say it like this:

They are like the argon in the tank of a tig welder, if they weren't there everything would work, but when your done it would look like crap.