IGVC Invitational

[Ken Leedle]

Originally Posted by IKE

Overall it was very neat to watch. The elevated floor gave it a sort of Boxing match feel where spectators were right next to the field (occasionally even taking a ball to the face ), and you could really hear the robots working. Thanks to whomever (TARDEC I think) hosted it. It was neat, fun, and an excellent contrast to IGVC.

As a leader of UW-Madison's IGVC team, I want to say that I really disliked the setup they had in the main tent at IGVC. While I'm sure that the high school teams involved had a lot of fun, the incredible amount of noise produced by the FIRST competition made it very difficult to give our design presentations and work on our autonomous vehicle. Debugging ten thousand lines of code and calibrating vision and other sensor parameters is difficult enough without people yelling and screaming 50 feet away. I think it would have been a much better setup if the FIRST arena was in the same tent as the FIRST pits and far away from the design presentation tent. I think that the stark contrast between the nature of the competitions makes them ill suited to be held at the same event.

While IGVC may seem lame to those not involved, it is not designed to be a pseudo-spectator sport like FIRST, so it is only interesting to people who are interested in developing autonomous vehicles. I think that the FIRST teams in attendance were in general ungracious and unprofessional to the hundreds of college students who were scrambling to get their vehicles working.

- Ken