Should teams be pushed to make higher quality robots?

[Bcahn836]

I'd say the rule about actually touching the loading zone triangle was pointless. It made so many nice robots look very cheap with zip ties and junk hanging off the front.

I agree with sanddrag.


We did not know that we would have and issue until our first competition in New Hampshire when we started getting penalties that our base prevented the refs from seeing that our robot was touching the triangles, I mean we were over top of the things and our omni wheels were on the corners of the triangles, the zip ties were just a quick fix to prevent penalties to a decent robot. I mean in six weeks not all teams can find solutions to every single rule or even consider what the refs will call on the feild. But ever since the fix with the zip ties our team hasn't gotten a penalty, so our quick fix worked, now if we would have known that would have been an issue we would have done something about it while building the robot.

I don't know maybe my team isn't to the level yet in nit picking and completly finding every single rule that in competition will affect our robot based on ref calls. In the build season we didn't think that our robot would have the any penalty issues, but I guess we were wrong.

[JohnBoucher]

What an interesting and timely subject.

Team 237 hosted a rookie team (1784 Litchfield HS) at last nights meeting. They are a startup with very limited exposure to this wonderful process called FIRST. They joined based on somebody taking their ears off about FRC and attending UTC last year. Their mentors are all new to this process. They are worried about being able to pull this off.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about how to build, what tools you really need, how to fund raise, what comes in the KOP and what their expectations should be for their rookie year. It was a great conversation. You can learn a lot by talking to rookies.

What do we all expect to get out of this? It's about the process. It's about compressing life into 6 weeks. It's about doing. It's about learning to fail. It's about gracious professionalism. It's about releasing the limitations that we all put on ourselves. It's about thinking outside of the box. It's about growing.

Perhaps we all need to talk to rookies, they are the ones that see this for what it's about.


Also For those that did not read all of Waynes post this is what you missed

It doesn't really matter about the robot. It is the team that they build that is the important accompliishment...

[nehalita]

Although I agree that robot's should look professional, I would like to point out that there are teams out there without the means to make a more professional robot. Who's to blame? Perhaps "we don't try hard enough" but I feel that something like this cannot be said without viewing what any particular team goes through.

It is true, as someone brought up previously, that there are students on teams that do not "care." Sometimes, I get frustrated at my own team because I get the impression that the effort is evanescent. But when I look at each individual student, I realize that it's not always their fault. It's no "one" person's fault. Building a team is hard work. It's harder than doing a fundraising activity, it's harder than building a robot, it's harder than finding the time and money to sustain the team. Building a team calls for effort from everyone's side and leadership from a dedicated few as well. I think building a "real" team is more important than striving for a higher quality robot.
In fact, if a "real" team is formed, slowly, the rest of the problems will be solved (of course the teams will still struggle).

This, of course, is my opinion. I had no intention of insulting anyone else's opinion stated here.

[CJO]

As a member of a team which had serious cash flow problems,

We have had any number of robots which looked a lot like overgrown erector sets, and we had one robot which looked (and functioned) like a real robot. Did we spend more on it? Only a little. Our actual real costs of materials were about $1200 for the robot chasis, which I contend that any team should be able to afford. The way we made it functionally excellent was by spending time, time and more time. How much? Well 3-4 of use lived at our machine shop for 3.5 weeks. We also made it excellent by refusing the "good enough" mentality. Any piece which earned the appelation "good enough" was immediatly thrown away. Our robot was neither anodized nor powder coated, but it ran perfectly. Through two complete regionals and all of the elimination matches (through the finals at 2 regionals) we never had a single mechanical problem* because we put time and thought into our design.

The other thing I see is teams getting into ruts. A decent basic design comes along and then everyone copies it. We (and the other really good robots) threw a lot of the "established design" out of the window for the really good designs. Some of you may recall heated discussion here a little less than a year ago debating that our robot would never even move. But we actually tried something, as opposed to just going with what other people do.

* I should note that our treads wore out, but they were planned as replacable, limited use parts