Collaborations

[Avarik]

Collaborations generally start due to team relations. The 22/254 collaboration began because one of our students contacted 254/60 about their drive train. over the summer, 254/22 worked together to work out some kinks. We originally planned to just collaborate on the drive train, but a few days after kickoff, we just seemed to kinda decide that a full collaboration was most efficient for all.

I feel that there are many advantages to collaborations. Just take a look the 968/254 bot - it's got 3 regional wins under its belt already!

[nuggetsyl]

Our team was thinking about it and we asked a few others if they wanted to but everyone we talked to was not interested in the idea. It takes us soooooo long to build a robot anyway working with another team might be tough. Ex this year we only had 2 days to program. Because the machine was not working up to our specs.

shaun

[Mr. Van]

Originally Posted by Avarik

I feel that there are many advantages to collaborations. Just take a look the 968/254 bot - it's got 3 regional wins under its belt already!

While there are many reasons to collaborate, I hope that the primary one is to Inspire students.

It seems to me that many of the teams that collaborate are already very capable teams that have very, very effective programs. At the time of their collaboration, 254 & 60 had each already won many regionals on their own. The same could be said for 22 & 254 last year. This year, the trend seems to continue.

To the teams that have collaborated: Has the collaboration improved your ability to engage and inspire students?

-Mr. Van
Coach, 599

[Travis Covington]

Originally Posted by Mr. Van

To the teams that have collaborated: Has the collaboration improved your ability to engage and inspire students?

-Mr. Van
Coach, 599

That was the goal. Being that we only really have a few college mentors, and one teacher, any free time we have where we aren't designing and running around getting parts made means more time we can spend with the students. Unfortunately, it didn't work out quite as well as we had hoped, but I still feel like it gave us a little more free time than we had in the past to spend with the students, engaging them and teaching them more about how the engineering process works. I'd like to think the students had a little more of our time this year than in years past, but I'll let them answer that.

[Drew]

What are they, You have been seeing them all over the competitions. Numerous bots that are exactly the same in everyway but one or two zip ties... Why is this, It kind of seems unfair. There is no creativity in these bots but the original designs. Its almost like, We cant figure out how to do this game so lets wait until another team gets an idea and let them give us the fabrication idea's parts, and help. Yea it is good to be gratious professionals and share your ideas and help other teams, but its like were here for a learning experiance and in the real world when you start designing your own products lets see how many companies will just come along and let you completly replicate your product. Now im sorry if i am seeming angry or mean but i tell you that i am not. Im just curious if there is a reason for this, its just weird seeing this sudden boom of replicated robots. If thats all we had to do then why didnt someone inform us, we could have join up with a diffrent team. do you or anyone else think that there may be a rule against clone bots, like a patented robot, If you make it no one else can copy to exact specification. Even though that is getting a little to extreme. the only good part i saw on this topic is once you find the weak points to the robot you know the weak points to the others also. so in terms the outcome can become good and bad... i guess it all just really comes down to autonomous and the programmer, just like always.... Blame the programmer

[themagic8ball]

Well a lot of the duplicate robots come from sister teams. I know two teams that came into Milwaukee with the same exact robot and I personally thought it was unfair. Its like basically taking one team, registering as 2, building 2 robots to bring to competition and if one breaks you have twice as much allowance of spare parts not to mention another whole robot worth of parts.

[dhitchco]

Originally Posted by Drew

What are they, You have been seeing them all over the competitions. Numerous bots that are exactly the same in everyway but one or two zip ties... Why is this, It kind of seems unfair. There is no creativity in these bots but the original designs......Now im sorry if i am seeming angry or mean but i tell you that i am not. Im just curious .....

Hey Drew,
I've been doing our team's photo/video at two regionals thus far (Finger Lakes & Boston) and agree that there are some robots with "similar" designs. I've been especially impressed with those bots that use vertical corkscrew ball elevators.

Since FIRST is really NOT a corporate-spying event, I fully embrace idea-sharing and design-stealing. It's not the bot itself that will win, it's much more in the learning process as well as the inter-team alliance-selection process.

So, even if there was 100 identical robots, I'll bet you than one of those teams will forget a zip-tie and their battery will die, or one of them will get pinned, etc.

So, let the designs fall-out where they may. In fact, I'd love to see a design book each year outlining the major "themes" of designs (e.g sweepers, elevators, corkscrews, 2-ball shooters, etc)

[Drew]

yea we also build a duplicate robot so we have a spare change of parts for everything. We could as well give our robot to a seprate team and they would be off and going, but we dont because its for change of parts because defiantly we loose parts every competition. I agree in the fact that the unfairity of the situation remains high because the teams pair up at the end, while one being very good on its own to score 40+ points per game they are stoppable but with 2 and 3 on the same alliance with one on defense and the other two scoring 100+ scores come with a breeze potentally owning the competition.. seems kind of unfortunate but it's something that cant be changed, its not too big of a problem though

[viking1902]

This topic is a bit controversial. Another thread discussing this can be found here.

[Collin Fultz]

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=collaboration
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=collaboration
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=collaboration

can we close this?

[Tim Delles]

Originally Posted by Collin Fultz

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=collaboration
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=collaboration
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=collaboration

can we close this?

Okay their have been numerous threads relating to teams collobration on robots. Thier have been teams for what I think 3 or 4 years now that collobrate. This topic has been beat dead twice that i know of already. So lets close it up.

[Katie Reynolds]

I'm merging "sister bots... Brother Bots.. Clone bots..???" with "Collaborations" since they're both new.

[Conor Ryan]

I recommend this for the Moderated Forum before it gets sticky

Ahh, The great collaborative design debate. Heres my 2 cents,

I don't see anything wrong with collaborative design? Why because all of the efforts that I've seen made are not all done by one team, its team work. Both teams come together and pool resources and build not one, but two robots, that tend to be very similar. Don't look at this as many people do, with one team leeching off of the other, the simple way to explain how it works is 2 heads are better than one. If you combine two teams you get a lot of benefits, double the mentors, double the resources, double the experience, pretty much a doubled team.

When one team meshes with another team and they can help each side's weaknesses, say one team has really strong programming but a weak electrical team, and another teams has strong electrical but weak programming, they come together and both end up with strong electrical and strong programming.

Never assume that when two (or even three) teams have a collaborative design that one team does all the work and the other two (or three) just sit around waiting to assemble their own. "Stock" Robots are the biggest misconception, these teams didn't get their designs from anywhere, they still came up with them on their own like any other team, the only difference is they worked on the project with another team.

[Don Wright]

Originally Posted by dhitchco

Hey Drew,
I've been doing our team's photo/video at two regionals thus far (Finger Lakes & Boston) and agree that there are some robots with "similar" designs.

It goes further than similiar... Just look around on CD for a few minutes...

[Stuart]

the only ones who are hurt by this is the teams that collaborate. . how inspirational can it be to not build and design your own robot . . I dont think that its against the rules or should be illegal . . but if you want to build the same robot as another team why not save the 6k registration and just join up with that team?

anyway thats my take on it