[moderated] pic: The 2006 NiagaraFIRST Triplets!

[Swan217]

Originally Posted by doubleslash

unfair: the fact that collaborating teams get to bring three of the same robots to the same competition.

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.

First, as Dean says, "FIRST is not meant to be fair." (paraphrased). See my post in the Rule 17 thread on "Levelling the playing field" vs. the fixit window.

Second, your concerns about collaborating assume that the final design completely outshines all others. This is only your one opinion, not fact. Since human players and drivers can't switch from team to team, the abilities of each robot is still limited to the students on each team. This was proven last year when 217 and 229 collaborated, and 217's drivers were much more comfortable with the robot than 229's drivers (No offense Jay T.).

Thirdly, if a team gets picked in eliminations, it obviously belongs there due to skill. If a robot is not picked, it obviously wasn't good enough to be picked as a partner. Whether you're 25th on the teams' pick list or 50th, it doesn't matter. Teams aren't going to arbitrarily pick another just because it's a sister team. And what if it is? Unless they win the regional together, it's a moot point. Just because one collaborating team wins, doesn't mean that the other "partner" gets to go to Atlanta. If anything, it's a disadvantage, because that "partner" team built a winning robot, and doesn't reap the benefits of winning.

Plus, your "plan" doesn't include the situation of when teams partially collaborate, such as the 217/229 collaboration. Though both teams were very similar, they were not identical. Would you combine these robots into one team because they collaborated, even though they're not identical? Moreover, would you combine all coincedentally identical robots into one team, just because they're identical? Your concerns are the same whether they collaborated or just coincidentally made the exact same design (which is very possible, given the specific rules of the game each year.)