An Exercise: Pros and Cons Of A Water Game

[PhilBot]

BTW, I thinks it's Great that Falcon Robotics has tackled the task of FIRSTing an underwater robotics competition. If they were closer to MD I'd want to send a team.

The more I thought about "problems" with fielding a team for this sort of competition, I realized that an essential isse is that it may be hard to find somewhere to test your robot.

Granted, not many FRC teams have full size playing fields for practice, but at least you can test the drive system anywhere. For a ROV contest, you need a reasonable quantity of water. If your school doesn't have a pool, or (more likely) they won't let you use it for robots, then what's the next option?

Sure you can use a 55 Gallon barrel of water..... but seriously, it's hard to build excitement that way

Once agian, I'm not trying to discourage the idea, I'm just highlighting the key problems, in order that they can be addressed. We don't have a school pool in my area, and even though I'm on a small lake, it would be difficult to use for testing purposes (especially when it's frozen

Luckilly, I've found a firm that will build me a test tank, and I have somewhere to put it. I'm am hugely lucky in this regard.

Phil.

[falconmaster]

The systems I am referring to does not come complete and are not very accurate. You can use a set of accelerometers that FIRST has provided in the past, I don't recall the make an model, maybe someone else can. They do not however account for drift as I mentioned before. Right now we are working on using two digital compasses that Davantech makes
http://www.acroname.com/robotics/par...7-COMPASS.html
and we can read the data coming from them, the next step is integrating it into the robot controller. It may not be as accurate, but we are not traveling long distances and we have visual feedback from the video cameras as well to make corrections. We will post our findings when we are done working on it. They cost 60 dollars each. The best thing is to use a Doppler Velocity Logger but that is 12 grand. Another compromise is
http://www.cloudcaptech.com/crista_imu.shtm
I think it is about $1500 - $2000 about he price of a IFI control unit
Maybe if FIRST buys lots of these the price might drop?

[falconmaster]

The tank is the biggest issue. Either the venue has to change or you can buy a lot of above ground pools. Very expensive for just one year. This is a problem for someone at a higher pay grade than mine.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by PhilBot

The more I thought about "problems" with fielding a team for this sort of competition, I realized that an essential isse is that it may be hard to find somewhere to test your robot.

Maybe that's why the underwater competition works so well in Arizona, of all places....if you live in Arizona, and you don't have a swimming pool in your back yard, your neighbor does!

[11Mort11]

con:
it would be hard to make a water tight field

[talltree357]

Pro: A new, and completely different challenge for students to take part in. Allowing them to explore new concepts, and areas of study.

Con: The problem with a water game is unless you build the tank out of translucent material, it is very unappealing for the crowd. Thus it makes it much worse when you are showing the field to potential sponsors and the crowd itself.

[Pavan Dave]

Originally Posted by Cory

pros: none
I truly don't understand the fascination with a water game. It doesn't interest me at all.

ditto...

there is a water game called MATE.... people who want a water game should ask their team leads to drop out of FIRST for a year, and do MATE...than choose if they want to do one or the other or even both in the future... that should get water out of many people's systems.

[falconmaster]

Originally Posted by Pavan

ditto...

there is a water game called MATE.... people who want a water game should ask their team leads to drop out of FIRST for a year, and do MATE...than choose if they want to do one or the other or even both in the future... that should get water out of many people's systems.

There is also NURC put on by APASE
www.h2orobots.org

We have both land and water based robots for 5 years....can't get it out of our system. We did MATE for three of them, couldn't get enough so we made our own. Let me know if you have a cure........

[Squab]

Pros: no one will be thirsty
Cons: water and electronics dont go together that well

[keen101]

The Pros of such a game would be increased thinking, and more creative designs.


The cons are obvious. One of which would be the transformation of all the regional arenas into "water arenas". I don't think that would go over to well with DU replacing their Ice Ring with water.

[N7UJJ]

Pro: No longer driving, you're flying: three dimensional field
Can be cheap: http://nventivity.com/ROVIAB.html

Con: Finding a team to compete against

[falconmaster]

Maybe we can use Sea world for a venue!

[MiniNerd24]

That would be awesome!
I've never been there and we get to show off robots that swim. And the robots might later be able to swim with animals too. (This is for all you enviromentalists out there.)

[JaneYoung]

Thank you for your posts with your pros and cons!

I tend to try to make order out of chaos. When posts are made about a water game, the suggestion is made but there is usually nothing of any substance to follow that suggestion. It has happened enough times that I wanted to try to get a better grasp of it. My initial thinking is that one cannot move from the land robots to water robots just like that. Experience and opinions have been shared in this thread and I think they have been beneficial in helping us understand the similarities and the differences regarding a water game.

One area that has not been talked about and I wonder about is suppliers. Would that change? If yes, how would that impact? What are those pros and cons as we know FIRST now?

Yes, there are other programs as has been discussed in this thread. What I would like to understand is that if a water game can be done, I don't think it is just that simple. When one makes a suggestion, he/she should try to look at the whole picture as much as he/she can see and then research and learn more about it. I think it goes further than a venue change.

[ervtech]

well for a practice field, you can always use a pool... for the warmer states thats easy, but for the colder states there are plenty of indoor pools around