A disturbing trend?

[George]

Team 60 (of the winning alliance) started with a bare frame Thursday morning![/quote]

In defense of the Team, we did ship an inspection passable robot to AZ,
but had problems with certain gearboxes that worker the arm and the ramps. with no good repair possible, the Team scraped the original robot and rebuilt it from the ground up, dumping the ramps and an arm movement.
Geo.

[kireitenshi00]

I do believe that most of the robots at the Pittsburgh regional "passed" inspection on Thursday and competed successfully on Friday. First match of the day... "You shouldn't have passed inspection, because your flag is mounted too low." Yea... 4 robots out of the 6 in the FIRST MATCH should not have passed inspection.

[thegathering]

This year, robots have two different tasks that require two unrelated to be incorporated into the overall design. Perhaps the trend has some relation to the increased complexity of the robots this year over the past couple years?

[Jeremiah Johnson]

For some not-so-odd reason I forsee this happening at lot at MWR. There's a significant number of rookie teams. Some of which are bound to follow the trend mentioned here in this thread. Others will know their stuff, especially those mentored. I wonder how many teams will be building on Thursday.

[AznPrincess3089]

I'll admit 1070 was one of the teams that was inspected friday morning (by 294's Andrew, who was amazingly nice enough to let 1070 go to their first match without a flashing light) since we were still working on the foot on thursday. i dont know what it was last year but this time, i think socal was used as a fix-it period before other teams' second regional so they were still making modifications on their robot. Does partial inspection on thursday count for anything?

[KTorak]

I noticed alot of teams waiting. As soon as we got our robot out of the crate, we took it to the inspectors and passed weight/size inspection immediately. We then passed the rest of inspection once the inspectors began to make their rounds.

Now on Friday morning, there were only about 10-15 teams that needed to finish inspection...that is still quite a few too many.

[Richard Wallace]

I'm wondering if the reason for this trend is unprepared teams, or not enough inspectors? I'm leaning toward unprepared teams.

At St. Louis we had about the same number of inspectors (8) that we have had for the last three years, and about the same number of teams (45). As in previous years we assigned one inspector to each row of the pits, so each inspector was responsible for six or seven robots.

As of pit closing time on Thursday there were 37 teams that had completed inspection, five that had minor items pending, and three that had major items pending. No team missed a qualifying match, but two came very close.

[David Brinza]

Originally Posted by thegathering

This year, robots have two different tasks that require two unrelated to be incorporated into the overall design. Perhaps the trend has some relation to the increased complexity of the robots this year over the past couple years?

For the veteran teams, I would agree with your assessment. The BeachBots - a very effective scoring robot with ramps found themselves a fraction of a pound overweight. Their short-term solution was to remove one of their ramps. I believe they ultimately removed a redundant motor in their arm in order to allow both ramps to be installed on the robot. Their final weight was 120.0 lb.

Rookie and 2nd/3rd year teams had non-compliance issues - not using correct wire guages, missing distribution blocks, pneumatic components, etc. I think part of the issue is the number of rules that the teams need to wade through (there are 116 rules in Section 8 - Robot of the Game Manual) to build a robot.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by David Brinza

I think part of the issue is the number of rules that the teams need to wade through

that is probably a significant part of it! Keeping track of what's happening here on CD is a great way to catch the typical problems ahead of time, though....people discuss the new or confusing or gotcha rules, which helps newer teams become aware of them.

[bfvaneyck]

At the Wisconsin regional (23 rookies out of 52 teams), if I remember correctly, we had about 12 teams not passing by the end of Thursday, but most of these were missing BOMs and final weigh-ins. I did spend Friday morning watching one robot being reassembled after the team found out on Thursday that they were two inches too wide and had to completely disassemble their robot to cut off two inches of the chassis. In the end I think that they only missed their first qualification match.

[wolfj]

There was a lot of that going on at Finger Lakes. It seemed like practice rounds only had one robot on each alliance. Its hard to say whose fault it is.

[roborat]

At pittsburgh, the inspection process was not anything like in the past. We went through weight and box then they looked over the robot and passed it. We did not have to go back through before the championship rounds like in the past.

[Peter Matteson]

At New Jersey I did notice a lot teams, mine included, that could not officially pass inspection until friday morning because we forgot/lost the PVC cap for the flag holder and couldn't go buy one until the end ofThursday when we left. Frankly, this was kind of embarassing that we missed it.

[bfvaneyck]

Originally Posted by Peter Matteson

At New Jersey I did notice a lot teams, mine included, that could not officially pass inspection until friday morning because we forgot/lost the PVC cap for the flag holder and couldn't go buy one until the end ofThursday when we left. Frankly, this was kind of embarassing that we missed it.

I noticed this problem last year at the regionals. This year we brought along four spare flag holders. We gave out one of them Friday morning at the Wisconsin regional.

[chinckley]

I wonder if the last minute inspections at GLR had to do with the great number of snow days late in the build season. We lost 8 build days due to weather constraints in the last 4 weeks of build season. We had weighed at school and were underweight and were a few pounds over when we weighed in Thursday morning so that is all we had to take care of really. We did pass on Thursday though.

Our first year, I think, we were first to pass.

It did seem to take many teams longer to pass than I ever remember.
Not sure why. A couple teams looked like they had lots of work to do
to get ready.