Practice bot morality

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Clinton Bolinger

You mean like adding a ramp for minibot deployment?

Every team should be iterating their designs between Regionals and Champs, continuous improvement. This is exactly like real life, if someone settles for their design and think that there isn't anything better to do they will be left behind (example http://www.buggy-whips.com/).

Like many people have already said the time contrant and rules only allows for the strong team to achieve greatness and limits the teams with less resources.

-Clinton-

Agreed.

the greatest lesson we can teach our kids is how to win.

How to set a goal to achieve some task, while at the time being fully aware that you are probably unaware of and currently incapable of solving half the battles along the way. Then, how to achieve that task.

[JesseK]

I like comparisons to the vague, esoteric, "real life". Real life has deadlines and engineers have to live with their choices, good or bad, after those deadlines.

Products have ship dates, projects have delivery dates, and software has launch dates. Iteration after those dates are usually due to a continuous cycle (cars improve every year), a public black eye (the iPhone 4 antenna, the 2007 Banebot transmission), or the need to adapt to market conditions after the fact (in which case you've already lost market share).

Allowing teams to work on their robot between Week 6 and Championships would be more like real life than leaving build season completely open. It'd also give mentors on all teams a break.

I'm not advocating a 'level playing field' by any means. I'm completely against removing the 45 day build season deadline on both principle and from a burn-out perspective. I'm also simply pointing out that I don't remember a 30 pound withholding allowance before the 2009 snow storms, so it's not like FIRST tried to balance elites and non-elites with that either.

Teaching kids how to win is one thing. Encouraging them to adopt a design paradigm that isn't pragmatic is entirely something else.

[Mark Sheridan]

I thought the Spirit and Opportunity robots had exact copies on earth for NASA to test with (one could call it practice) before having Spirit and Opportunity try it for real. Someone correct me if I am wrong. With aerospace, one cannot afford to make mistakes. You have to test before to be sure (often many times before).

Practically, I think all industries have some sort of equivalent of the practice robot. If an engineer receives a customer complaint or wants to improve the product, he or she should have a copy of that product to replicate the complaint or identify a potential improvement.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Mark Sheridan

I thought the Spirit and Opportunity robots had exact copies on earth for NASA to test with (one could call it practice) before having Spirit and Opportunity try it for real. Someone correct me if I am wrong. With aerospace, one cannot afford to make mistakes. You have to test before to be sure (often many times before).

Practically, I think all industries have some sort of equivalent of the practice robot. If an engineer receives a customer complaint or wants to improve the product, he or she should have a copy of that product to replicate the complaint or identify a potential improvement.

True. Well, one "close enough" copy that I know about. They also had a "Mars Yard" to test in.

I think you're right about the industry, as well. Sometimes, that company copy isn't quite enough, but if an issue is known, it can be used to test solutions.