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.