Reflection 2005 Season

[Bcahn836]

This season FIRST has stepped up the competition and continues to provide us all with challenges and lessons.
Now that the 2005 season is over with the exception of a few off season competitions. What are your opinions of this year? What have you and your team learned from this season? What are your final thoughts and comments about this season?

I will post my responses later. . .

[Freddy Schurr]

What I learn is that we need to be better at team organization and what we really need to do next year is have better communication and teamwork. We lack that this year and it really show during competition. What about the game, I though that the autonomous period was hard with camera and was a big effort for a lot of teams to cap during it.But it was an amazing game.Everyone had they own approach and it was cool to see had teams did it. What in long part, for my last year in robotics, it was a great one and I had a blast with everything that occur. You never know what FIRST is coming up, so until next year.

[techtiger1]

I think for my team we learned that having a good bot isn't the only thing that matters. It's how you market it and how you sell it to the other teams that count. Also making a name for your team by providing and inspiring other teams. Like Dean said at the beginning the robot is just a vechicle.

[nehalita]

What I learned is the fact that I will always learn something new. I came in this year knowing nothing and careless, and now I exit knowing how much more there is to learn and a newfound fanatic!

Our team has come a long way but, with the great opportunity to see other teams, we have learned how to further ourselves and most of all, we have gained the confidence to know we can take our team to a new level.

Next year calls for more organization, more dedication and more enthusiasm. As techtiger1 stated, at the beginning, the robot is just a vehicle -- it was for us. Now we know it is about outreach, about learning, about working as a team, and enjoying the process. We didn't do that this year, but you have to make a mistake to learn your lesson, right?

I can't wait for the next season to start and my anticipation has already started. But in a way, if you think about it, the season's already started. =)

[Sakura141]

"It doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It's how you play the game." My team may have run into some bad luck during the competition, but I'm proud of what's happened this year. This is a recap from Team 141's year

-Hold a Lego League camp at Hope College during the summer
-Start Weekly meetings when school starts along with planting Dune Grass and doing community service in various forms
-Starts the Wo-Bot C.A.R.E.S calculator drive for the elementary schools for the kids who can't afford math supplies
-Lose JCI as our sponser right before lego league
-Lego League starts late and the Robotics team helps them to stay on track
-Manage to get enough donations to pull of the West Michigan Lego Regional with Team 85
-Get JR Automations to help sponser us in time for build season
-Has a very rocky start with the robot because of our new JR mentors, old JCI mentors, and various parents are constantly arguing
-Barely finishes Robot for ship date
-Robot improves every regional
-Win Engineering Inspiration at the Buckeye
-Win Entrepreunuership at West Michigan
-Head to Nationals

(Left to Do)
-More community service and the elementary tours

[sanddrag]

I like Triple Play in the sense that is forced teams to build a manipulator that worked well and most did. There were not too many boxbots. I didn't like the idea of pretty much only one game option (stacking tetras) but it was good in the sense that everyone HAD to do it well, and they did.

The kit of parts was nice in the sense that now everybody had a good reliable drivetrain so they could immediately start work on an arm, but I think WAY too many teams used the kit provided gearbox. The drive system was the passive subsystem of this game and with 3 vs 3 I think it should have been an active subsystem in playing this game. The kit gearbox is good for getting rookies into this more fairly and it is good for teams with not many resources but I'm disappointed when I see 5th year teams using that gearbox. I want to see a game that makes us strive for a better drive system than they provide in the kit.

But at least the provided drive system did allow everyone to make a really good arm.

Finally, let the robots touch each other. I know safety is key but 6 robots on a small field all trying to avoid each other isn't much fun to watch from the stands. I want to see the pushing and shoving.

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

Finally, let the robots touch each other. I know safety is key but 6 robots on a small field all trying to avoid each other isn't much fun to watch from the stands. I want to see the pushing and shoving.

Me too--then again, I'd feel really bad if a human player got whacked in the head with their robot's arm. (Especially 85's screw setup this year--ouch.)

Of course, for 2006, you could still have that interaction safely; it simply takes a bit of trickery in game design. Luckily, FIRST has a few masters/mistresses of trickery on the game design committee.

I learned that anything is possible with dedication.

As most of you know by now, we had some communication issues, and at kickoff we had a sponsor, a high school, some facilities, and mentors...

but no students. I personally thought we had no chance, or that we would end up with 3 kids and a horrible machine.....I was wrong.

Finally, we had a call out meeting the Thursday of week 2. We had 19 or so kids show up. We ended up training these kids who have never seen a FIRST competition before, designed it in the next 2 weeks, built a robot in 10 days (actual construction), finished and submitted an animation entry, wrote a chairmans award (for the NASA grant) and even got our own website up and running. We had a slow start at Boilermaker regional, but by the end we got the hang of this and even walked out with the Rookie All Star Award, qualifying us for Atlanta. Midwest regional we ended up as the 8th seed, ended up being the 6th alliance captain and highest rookie seed. Last weekend we walked out of there with a 5-2 record, 21st seed and inspired kids who before this didn't know each other, but now are all good friends and worked very well together.

To sum it up, with what little time we had, this team became a true team and I'm proud of everyone, and this proved that anything is possible.

[Andy B]

The best part about this year's game I thought is that it really did level the playing field. There wasn't one strategy or robot that could "do it all" because the whole game consisted of stacking tetras. The thing that distinguished one robot from another was the amount of tetras a robot could score, but at that, almost all the robots could score tetra's (on top or beneath). A lot of well-known teams didn't stand out as well as they had in past year's games.

[Goldeye]

Although I was thrilled to see the unbelievable performance at the Einstein finals. The goals that high....wow. However, I was very surprised by the way the game evolved. I really expected the game to become much more defensive in a very specific, focused way, as teams realized that the other team simply is better at capping. That is, strategy becoming ever more important. However, this wasn't the case. The very finals were determined by who got on the goal last. However, what I wanted to see were teams preventing other teams from scoring by taking advantage of the advantages of their own bot, and flaws in the opponents. If a bot is weak and slow, staying in between it and the goal it needs to take would be more than reasonable. Same thing with a bot that can easily lose their tetra. Knocking it loose (whether due to an unstable, shaky base, or lifting it out of their ineffectively designed gripper) is unbelievably effective. There were bots that would have been able to do such things, and didn't. I was extremely disappointed to see how one dimensional the game became - capping on top of your opponents tetras...over and over.

That said, it was overall an amazing season. No matter how it was played, the games were close and fair. Though there certainly were some major referee messups here and there, they happen, they're human. There were amazing robots, by both rookies and vets, and it was amazing to see them compete.

[BHOP]

Yo,

This season, I could not have asked for anything different. It went amazing, except for some bad luck at regionals, which changed to good luck at nationals. Man o man, we have a very impressive list of accomplishments that our team has never ever done before. I was going to be very very happy for regional chairmans, which we got. Then we went to nationals, did amazingly sweet, I'm the arm operator from team 503. Our alliance couldn't have been better. This season was insane, for the HOT team I bet it was even better. Congrats to everyone who participated this season.

BHOP

Team 503 Frog Force
2005 National Champs

[Alex Pelan]

Given our team's success last year, this year I had to cope with losing in FIRST for the first time .

That being said, though, I think I got more out of this year than I did last year. Last year, with a senior class of 16, we really didn't need any underclassmen help, at all. This year was completely different, and I got chances to do a lot more things than I did the year before. I worked with the camera a bit, and learned a lot of different programming concepts from that, as well as bits and pieces about electrical, pneumatics, and manufacturing concepts as well. However, the more valuable knowledge that I gained this year was probably not technical:

-Sometimes, we work so hard on these robots that it is hard to see flaws in them. It is hard to cope with losing, and oftentimes the blame goes elsewhere, such as on the refs, or poor alliance pairings. However, sometimes it takes a thing, like not getting picked for eliminations at Philly did for me, for you to truly take a step back and look at what you've done in comparison to everyone else's.

-Everyone else works at least as hard, if not just as hard as you do on your robot.

-Volunteers really put in a ton of time and effort; I know I was personally wiped after a day of volunteering at nationals. I recommend trying it out to all of you, it's a ton of fun.

As for reflection on this game, overall I liked it. Multi-tetra capabilities were unnecessary this year, as we saw no teams that could handle more than one in the final rounds. Simple robots that could cap extremely quickly, and had incredible drive teams, as well as good on-field strategy could take it all very quickly. The tide would often turn extremely quickly in these matches. In one of them, I turned away for a few moments to see a red triple play become a blue one. The tetras were an innovative game object for this year, and field reset was not nearly as tough as it was last year (unless you're relatively short, like me, and trying to grab tetras off the center goal).

-Alex Pelan

[Bcahn836]

I said that I would post me response later so here goes.

This year's game I think was pretty challenging, it forced teams to come up with innovative designs in arm systems which my team is starting to get the hang of, and our programing team stepped it up this year and won us an award.

This season we learned to go for it all. Last year we unfortunately decided that capping and uncapping goals would be more important than hanging from the bar. This years game taught us to not design a robot based on alliances, because you can't always depend on your teammate to make up for your robots weaknesses. This year also taught us that nothing design wise is out of our reach. Next year I hope we have a game that really demands a good strong drive train, because that is probably our weak point, compared to other veteran teams.

My final thoughts of this season are good. This season really helped my team as well as others to venture out and try something different. This is our forth year and the second year we have used pneumatics. We have usually abandoned the idea of pneumatics because of their trade offs and we usually used motors for our arm systems. I think that this season was my teams best, for us it isn't all about winning a competition but it is about teaching the morals of FIRST and Engineering.

[Bill Gold]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I like Triple Play in the sense that is forced teams to build a manipulator that worked well and most did. There were not too many boxbots. I didn't like the idea of pretty much only one game option (stacking tetras) but it was good in the sense that everyone HAD to do it well, and they did.

The kit of parts was nice in the sense that now everybody had a good reliable drivetrain so they could immediately start work on an arm, but I think WAY too many teams used the kit provided gearbox. The drive system was the passive subsystem of this game and with 3 vs 3 I think it should have been an active subsystem in playing this game. The kit gearbox is good for getting rookies into this more fairly and it is good for teams with not many resources but I'm disappointed when I see 5th year teams using that gearbox. I want to see a game that makes us strive for a better drive system than they provide in the kit.

But at least the provided drive system did allow everyone to make a really good arm.

Finally, let the robots touch each other. I know safety is key but 6 robots on a small field all trying to avoid each other isn't much fun to watch from the stands. I want to see the pushing and shoving.

Dave,
I think your disappointment with the number of teams using the kit provided gearbox is easily countered with your own words. You seem to be upset with the large number of veteran teams using the kit drivetrain, yet you also say that “The kit of parts was nice in the sense that now everybody had a good reliable drivetrain so they could immediately start work on an arm.” These statements seem to be contradictory.

I’ve commented on this before in this post, and here I am doing it again; you can’t expect every team that has been in FIRST for X amount of years to automatically start fabricating a custom gearbox for either a drivetrain or an arm every year. To do this is time consuming, expensive, and resource consuming, and for many established teams this would cause them to be stretched too thin. You seem overly obsessed with custom drive systems in FIRST. Yes, they can be cool, but they aren’t always necessary or feasible for teams to build. If you want a different drivetrain and arm on every robot in FIRST then we’d have to go back to some sort of system similar to that of elementary and middle school reports, where each team tells FIRST what they’re going to do their “report” on and no one else is allowed to work on the same subject matter. This is most certainly not going to happen. You say you want a game that’ll make us “strive for a better drive system than [the one provided in the kit],” but in order for that to be the case it pretty much means that the kit drivetrain / gearbox would be so useless for the game that had it been left out it wouldn’t have hindered a team’s design / build process at all.

I also think that your longing for pushing and shoving shows a misunderstanding of how the majority of high scoring teams play the games. Hitting is, normally, a tactic reserved for a robot that cannot score. It makes absolutely no sense for a high scoring team to not score for a match and just hit another robot, since all that does is take themselves off of their own high scoring game. In this game it made sense to, after having scored a tetra, play defense on an opposing robot for a few seconds to dislodge a tetra or to mess up a robot’s scoring rhythm. This game was designed for “run and gun” game-play and not “push another robot around the field for 2 minutes” game-play. I strongly believe that fast and massive scoring of scoring objects is much more exciting than a robot that just drives around and 16 fps crashing into things and then switches down to 1.5 fps to push everything in sight around.

I guess the bottom line is that if you don’t think that enough teams are being innovative with their robots, then you need to put your money where your mouth is and be an example to others. But do not make the mistake that innovation is the key to winning. More often than not, the simplest robot is the one that wins the competition. This isn’t to say that winning is everything, it isn’t, but you might want to see how the other people on your team stand on the “best shot to win” vs. “coolest / weirdest new mechanism” debate before you decide which path you’re going to go down.

There's my $0.02

-Bill

The kit transmission was very close to what 639 would've machined. So we used it.