Collegiate FIRST competition

[CJmango]

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

I thought about joining the project on FIRSTforge to share this, but figure it is just as well posted here.

3)Not focusing on the robot: This is the biggest one.

To address your third concern, the weights set forth in the manual are very much just placeholders.

This concern of yours highlights the HUGE variability in what people think. You can ask for the program to be perfect, for it to not take away from FRC, for robots to be built for almost nothing... but ultimately these things are impossible. This award structure is how we will recognize that there is more to the engineering challenge than the short competition; there is more to FIRST than the robot; there is more to a team than the driver on the field; and so on.

As for the same robots each year, just because the challenge may vary doesn't mean a team can't build off of the same platform. This program has no restrictions in place to prevent re-entry next year. Of course, this is a pilot and we've never done it before, so who knows?

The reason there are multiple challenges this year is that we have no idea how well any of these robots will perform. We also have no idea what sorts of challenges the robots will be able to complete. This 3-game triathlon format is how we will utilize our experiment to take as much data as possible. We increment the difficulty and test out various air and ground modalities with the hope of receiving as much feedback as possible about what people like and dislike following the event. Do you like one game more than another? Tell us!

Thanks for the critical thinking and great feedback!