[FTC]: Please Don't Post Pictures

[ManicMechanic]

We've been on both sides of the photo coin. At our first regional FLL tournament, there was a team that followed our robot around with a video camera. Our team had never attended a robotics event of any kind or seen any competition robots in photos, so the ideas used were original. The team was initially outraged when the other team showed up at the State Championship with a near replica of their robot.

The team quickly changed its thinking when:
1) The other team's replica robot performed even worse than the one they brought to regionals,
2) The team got to see the work of other, better robots at State and thought, "Hey, we'd like to use these ideas in the future." They realized that there was far more to gain than lose by sharing.

The team is comfortable with sharing, but fully understands and emphathizes with those who prefer not to. We respect the wishes of those who want to save their best designs for competition (and we hope they'll be willing to post after the season is finished).

Originally Posted by jbbjjbt

Early in the season at the first FTC events, there are many varieties of robots showing much creativity. By Worlds, it seams to me that there are many copies of a very few robots. In FRC the robots are shipped after six weeks, so there are many varied and creative robots.

I think the lack of variety has more to do with the structuring and point values assigned to the game tasks. More tasks with more balanced weighting of points would result in better variety and creativity of robots. There is more discussion on this topic in the Vex forum at this thread.