[moderated] pic: The 2006 NiagaraFIRST Triplets!

[doubleslash]

I'd have to say right up front that I don't necessarily agree with collaboration, but only one specific part, which is the one that makes it inherently unfair: the fact that collaborating teams get to bring three of the same robots to the same competition.

I agree that working together will produce a stronger bot, I've had year after year of schoolteachers that constantly teach us the power of teamwork. But you have to think of the inherent unfairness of multiple teams building the exact same robot and attending the same competition in terms of utility. I highly doubt that even if some teams don't have the mentors, the facilities, the programmers, etc, that they won't have the drivers and human players to make their collaborated clone robot succeed at a competition. Having three teams with three robots is basically commensurate to one team cloning themselves in order to increase their chances in the competition three times.

A second problem is a repeat of what someone else noted, that if one team gets into the top 8, they will often pick teams they are collaborating with to join their alliance. I personally saw this happening at SVR last year, and believe that every team that gets picked by their collaborating partners is another team that could have gotten picked but didn't.

If you think of the teams as a black box interface, it doesn't matter to me how a robot gets built, by how many people with so many facilities and so many mentors, as long as they follow a basic rule that I think FIRST should adopt: "One team, one robot, one competition." If there's one robot being made, regardless of the teams behind it, only one robot is put in a box and loaded into the truck on the ship date, only one robot shows up at the competition.

I realize that this is rather difficult since the teams are still distinct (often geographically, by school), but I can't see how they would fail to manage if they could build a robot together why they couldn't see it at the competition together.

The best way for FIRST to go about making this happen, in my opinion, are a new set of rules to "level the playing field" - as they said when they introduced the Fix-it Window - a rule that allows teams to declare themselves as collaborating, who therefore are from then on, considered to be one team in the eyes of FIRST, the competition organizers, and their computer systems.

Example: instead of Team X, Team Y, and Team Z showing up at a regional with three robots, which are all the same, Team X, Team Y, and Team Z declare themselves as a collaborating team (probably sometime before the kickoff?) so that in the eyes of FIRST, they aren't Team X, Team Y, and Team Z anymore, they're "Team X, Y, and Z" now. This avoids the trouble that would occur if teams that collaborated were forced to register a new team, so that teams would constantly be registered and abandoned as collaboration partners changed. Instead, the FIRST system simply creates a meta-team that consists of multiple collaborating teams. That one team brings their one robot to the one regional. That one team plays with their strong robot. There are no other teams with the same strong robot going on in the background and tripling their chances of succeeding. And when that one team gets into the top 8, they can pick other strong teams that otherwise might not have been picked. "One team, one robot, one competition."

Again, I must repeat, that I do agree that collaborating produces stronger robots. But at the same time I see an inherent problem with this that takes advantage of what I might dare call a loophole in the FIRST system. I've suggested a way to remedy this. If anyone has further ideas on why my ideas don't work or aren't plausible (<- this is the one I'm looking out for), other ways FIRST could improve their system (or whether it really needs "improving"), please post them.