On Game Design

[Matt Adams]

Here's a serious question that perhaps some have not thought about_:

What percent of your team's budget is put into building the robot?

I would say that most typical small-medium teams are running budgets of 20-30k aren't limited by the costs on building the robot. The $5,000 for the first competition and $4,000 for a second regional, plus all of the buses or airplane tickets hotel arrangements... this isn't cheap stuff. This is prohibitive.

Money doesn't help you build a better robot... or even level the field. Great engineers will do more with less.

The real quality difference isn't the cost, it's the machining setup. If you or a local sponsor has access to CNC equipment, you've got a huge advantage to the small team using hand drills in a janitor's closet. This is a fact of life, and nothing can change this. Team 461 has CNC's set up at their high school... which has been a huge advantage. Lots of money, lots of top notch engineers and high school students, large facilities, and off season programs are making FIRST teams more competitive. Each teams needs to decide for themselves how much they want to invest in being competive, and how much they want to invest in engineering inspiration. They are only mildly intertwined.

As to regards to this years game, I don't think that picking up a ball and placing it on the goal was an extraordinatorly difficult task. However, hanging was trickier for one reason... so I'll go a little off topic.

It would be a very different game this year if the bar was 8 or 9 feet off the ground instead of 10. Because of the robot's 5 foot height limit, you couldn't have a two link arm fold in on itself once and be tall enough to reach over the 10 foot bar to hang. Hanging required an arm to either two revolute joints, or a revolute and prismatic joint. This makes arms much more complicated in terms of finding kinematic solutions for object placement by the drivers, and requires an additional motor to provide this function. You could get around this requirement by being able to climb the 6" steps, but often still, many teams still required an additional link on their robot due to the angle of approach and additional length required.

Anyway, those are some thoughts. Thanks to everyone for bringing up this interesting topic.

Matt

[Ryan F.]

Originally Posted by Matt Adams

I would say that most typical small-medium teams are running budgets of 20-30k aren't limited by the costs on building the robot. The $5,000 for the first competition and $4,000 for a second regional, plus all of the buses or airplane tickets hotel arrangements... this isn't cheap stuff. This is prohibitive.

Money doesn't help you build a better robot... or even level the field. Great engineers will do more with less.

Totally true...people talk about all these tens of thousands of dollars people will spend on their robot....that might be nice and all...but it's definetly not necessary. Our team this year had the extra equiptment on the robot valued a little over 1000.... 500 being for donated machining of plates for our transmission. Besides those costs....almost no more money went into the robot. But, we were still able to be very competative...and take 7'th place at our regional.

Ellaborate systems are not needed to make a winning robot. Sure, they may be nice....but once they break down your in a very tight spot. We use simple...but effective solutions, that we know will work match after match after match. In the end, what matters is consistency.

[Matt Leese]

While there are many teams there are a few teams that can build anything they want to out of raw materials, they are in the minority and will almost always be so. However, that doesn't remove the fact that it's a legitimate point that they can build any part that they would want to buy. That said, I don't think that the small number of teams that this refers to should be what the decisions are based around.

In fact, it may not be possible for a team to always build all the components that they want. I remember specifics instances in 1998 and 1999 where we built our base out of steel, not because of strength issues, but merely because of cost issues (this was when the cost limit was around $500). When that becomes the case, the cost issues can become quite a limiting factor. (I realize that for a single gear this isn't a large issue but it does add up over time).

As for robots not looking good enough for television, as long as I've been involved with FIRST, there have always been good looking robots (and that includes times when the price limit was much lower). In my opinion, the winning robots have begun to look worse rather than better the past few years (but this is just my personal opinion). In fact, by including more ways to score in the game, it makes it less likely that FIRST will ever get television coverage (which may or may not be a good thing).

While I normally don't like to include more rules and I'm not even sure if this would ever be a good idea, but perhaps FIRST needs to look into a way of recording the costs of machining time? If FIRST is supposed to approximate real-world engineering in any way, this would seem to be an important part of the program. That said, I don't think any simple system would work nor am I proposing any. It's simply a thought.

Matt

Originally Posted by Matt Leese

Over the past couple of years, I haved made some observations on the direction FIRST seems to be headed. FIRST has changed the overall direction of some of the rules and the game design in this time span. In some ways these changes have been positive but I've started to believe that there were some unintended consequences that were derived from these changes.

First of all, we've seen that overall the games have gotten more complicated over the past few years (last year with the stacking, this year with the hanging). By complicated and complex, I mean that it requires a complicated or complex robot to successfully compete in the game. This was done with the stated intention of giving more of a challenge to veteran teams but still allowing a "easy" component to the game for rookie teams. While I do find it a bit condescending to leave an "easier" component for the rookie teams, the bigger problem is the fact that it divides the competition into several levels of play. In some ways it's saying that if you're rookie or choose one objective that you aren't eligibile to actually compete.

One of the other major issues that I've seern is tied into the idea of more complicated games. Over the past several years, FIRST has dramatically loosened the parts requirements. This had made it much easier for more complicated robots to be built. Because it's easier to build complicated robots, FIRST has had to make the game more challenging to keep up. While I do appreciate some of the well designed systems that teams have come up with, I think that it helps to further divide teams between those who are able to compete and those who are not.

Because of this added complexity, some teams spend their off-seasons designing two-speed drive trains and other components. While I saluate teams that are able to successfully create a year-round program, it shouldn't be a requirement to be competitive. FIRST knows that many sponsors are not interested in year-round programs and has attempted to address the issue; by making it easy to design systems that can be used on the robot outside of the build period (specifically, I look at various drive trains), FIRST is not helping reduce the reliance on year-round programs.

My proposed solution to these problems is fairly simple. For one, make the complexity of the game less. It's not a problem to raise the bar but don't make it too high for most teams to compete. However, simply making the complexity of the game less would not be enough as it would just allow teams to dominate. The real key is to also drastically restrict the allowable parts. I would highly suggest dropping the allowable spending amount to below $1000 (I think somewhere between $500 and $750 would be a good point). This has many benefits. For one, it does not stop anyone from building a complex robot; it merely makes it harder and would require more ingenious solutions. It would also require more tradeoffs to be made if one complex component were desired by a team. It also drops the required amount of fundraising a team has to do as it wouldn't be possible to spend as much money on the robot.

As for reducing the complexity of the game, I would make several other suggestions to FIRST. For one, keep the methods of scoring to two ways that require specific mechanisms to accomplish it (i.e. moving your robot to a certain area of the field wouldn't count as a method). For games that did this well, I'd look at 2002 and 2000. This makes it reasonable to either make a specialized robot or a generic robot. The key is to also keep the difficulty of the two methods not too divergent or one method will be ignored. The other key is to keep the methods of scoring somewhat similiar in point values (2004 and 2000 did this very well; 2003 did not).

I do not know if it's desired by FIRST for everyone to compete on an equal footing (which, while truly impossible, we can at least attempt to approach it), but I would say it should be. The key to doing this is to make the games such that even a rookie can successfully do any of the tasks. The corollary to this is restricting the parts availability rules such that teams have to engineer from scratch every year to add everything they want to (this means that teams can't carry over designs year-after-year as easily and instead have to tailor their design to each year's game).

Matt

Although your intentions seem good, I don't think the way you want to go about 'enforcing' it is the right way. If you prohibit teams from spending money on the robot (the current limit is good), many complex robot systems might not be able to be added. Personally, I think its cool when a robot does something really complicated - and, yes, it does inspire me. So, I say, don't overregulate.

On the issue of rookie team competition, no way can anyone say that rookie teams have a huge disadvantage. And, a big obstacle is just a bigger motivation to do even better. There are always some rookie teams at the top of the rankings (if you want to measure success that way). FIRST's methods for desiging the game are great, and I've only seen their games get better every year!