IGVC Invitational

[Chief Pride]

Originally Posted by Ken Leedle

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

While I have to agree that probably most of the time the FRC field was being a little loud, I couldn't help but feel unwelcome from the IGVC teams, right from the very beginning.

Even as the field was coming out of the trailer it seemed as though people were not very open minded to the idea of sharing their tent, presumably because they had a preconceived notion that we would be loud, obnoxious, and irritating. While we may have been I think that alot of this is being a little exaggerated.

I went around quite a few times to look at IGVC robots, as I was pretty interested, and tried to ask a few questions, however all of the teams did not seem very willing to answer questions about the robot, or for the most part even acknowledge my existence.

The whole reason of this competition was to "inter-mingle" I did my part, as well as a few on my team, or well, at least we tried to. I didn't see one college team member come to the FRC pits, to even look around.

[JackN]

Originally Posted by Chief Pride

The whole reason of this competition was to "inter-mingle" I did my part, as well as a few on my team, or well, at least we tried to. I didn't see one college team member come to the FRC pits, to even look around.

One member of the team from U of T-Austin who was also a mentor on team 2158, whose name I never caught, came and talked to 494 and 70 about their robots, I am sure he talked to other teams as well.

The idea of having a competition like IGVC and mixing it with a FIRST event seems risky. The two competions are on opposite ends of the energy scale. The IGVC is designed to be a mental and technical challenge while FRC is designed to be a spectator sport.

I really enjoyed the IGVC competition. This game was a blast 2 v 2 and I would be interested to see this format expanded. Inviting the top 20 teams and having them go at the game made all the matches very competitive. I would love to see FiM return to the even next year since I bet most of the problems can be worked out by the smart people involved with TARDEC and FiM.

[Alex Dinsmoor]

Originally Posted by JackN

I really enjoyed the IGVC competition. This game was a blast 2 v 2 and I would be interested to see this format expanded. Inviting the top 20 teams and having them go at the game made all the matches very competitive. I would love to see FiM return to the even next year since I bet most of the problems can be worked out by the smart people involved with TARDEC and FiM.

Looking back at how well FiM handled everything this year, I have a feeling that this event will be back next year, better and more IGVC-friendly than ever before!

[Richard McClellan]

Originally Posted by JackN

One member of the team from U of T-Austin who was also a mentor on team 2158, whose name I never caught, came and talked to 494 and 70 about their robots, I am sure he talked to other teams as well.

The member of the UT Austin team that you refer to was actually me! I definitely enjoyed the opportunity to see the top 20 teams in Michigan, though I agree with some of the other posts that it was difficult to find time to check out the FRC teams, because we were very busy working on our robot. I still managed to find a few hours during the weekend to go and see all of the robots in the tent, and watch a few matches, though I didn't have time to keep track of how the teams were actually doing in the scrimmage, but that was okay.

The demonstration would have been better if the IGVC officials had done a better job introducing the competition more formally. Most of the college students there were not very familiar with FIRST, so I'm sure it seemed like the scrimmage was nothing but an invasion of space. On Monday morning at the opening ceremony, they did introduce it by saying they hoped everyone had gotten a chance to see it, but by that point, the FRC scrimmage was over and all the teams had gone home.

Overall, I was very impressed with every robot there, all having strong scoring mechanisms, many with crab drive, and most of all, seemed very reliable. It makes sense since it was an invitational to the top teams, but it was still impressive.

[lynca]

Originally Posted by Chief Pride

The whole reason of this competition was to "inter-mingle" I did my part, as well as a few on my team, or well, at least we tried to. I didn't see one college team member come to the FRC pits, to even look around.

I know of many FRC alumni who now participate in IGVC. They are all very enthusiastic about IGVC and FRC ! I would imagine most teams' IGVC robot was not working so they had little time to mingle with FIRST teams.

I think its great that they put together FIRST off-season with IGVC. They will most likely do a better job sharing the space next year.