I know I am just looking at pictures but i am seeing a lot of good looking well built robots this year. I think capping tubes most teams in the payoffs will be able to go tit for tat with each other. The mini bot race will be the biggest factor, and having 3 robots cap in auto the second biggest factor. I think by week 4 (most teams will have recreated sud 2 sec mini bots)this will turn out to be the most competitive field of robots first has ever seen. Looking forward to the nail biting endings.
Shaun, there are a lot of good looking robots, but where is 25’s…? 
I’m glad this game has a lot of quality tube scorers. The game is easier than 2010, which is a good thing as more matches will be competitive and exciting to watch.
With a mini bot lol
Lol, kinda thought so.
8WD coming back? Or you sticking with 6?
I agree, this is going to be fun!
As much as I think there will be some amazing creations this year, I still think the most “competitive” year was the 2002 competition. Will this year be one of the most? I think so.
And I think the 2001 competition was one of the most interesting years for robot appearance and mechanisms (since you didn’t have to worry much about biffing and banging)
Back when the robot section of the rulebook was 6-8 pages long. 3-4 if they were double sided. 
This is by far the most “perfectly competitive” game that FIRST has created. Although I have been impressed by all of the videos and promos that have been posted so far, there isn’t a team that I have seen yet that is light years beyond the others in terms of speed and ability. The range of skill between teams has drawn closer this year.
Another item to consider is the fact that the speed of the minibot has a limit, and I think a good deal of veteran teams have already met that limit. By nationals, a team that wants a minibot under 2 seconds will in fact have a minibot that goes up in that time (with a decent deployment as well). When this happens, the focus will shift back to how fast teams can put up tubes. The speed of how fast teams can put up tubes also has a very small and competitive range.
I think people are going to be pleasantly surprised about how spectator friendly and exciting the matches will be, especially come elims and nationals. The only unfortunate thing about Logomotion is that there will be false starts with the minibots as the races begin to get more competitive. This could have been easily avoided if FIRST placed a 30" tall slip ring inside the base of the tower that would collapse at the 10 second mark to prevent false starts (think gates for motocross races).
Logomotion is the game that FIRST set out to create back in 2009 with Lunacy. A game that has a glass ceiling that ultimately levels the playing field for a lot of the teams out there. (For anyone that didn’t know, one of the goals of Lunacy was to “level the playing field for all teams”. It’s debatable as to whether or not it worked, I still saw the same teams on Einstein that year as all the other years, but I digress.)
At the end of the day, this is a drivers game.
Any team paying attention by doing things like looking here on CD and using resources like the 2007 Behind the Design book should be able to design an effective robot this year.
Unfortunately, as we all know, most teams will not take advantage of these resources. So even though we have seen a lot of nice bots here on CD, I don’t expect to see a significant increase in robot quality.
I’m more interested to see how this game evolves over the course of the season. I think the changes will be great. This is a year where we will see robots that are ineffective scorers evolve into effective runners instead of instantly turning to defense, and as always defense will change as we progress through the year. Also minibot evolution will be huge.
This is normally a GREAT thing.
But when you have points dependent exactly on how good your partners are (minibot), it becomes basically a coin flip rather than a game of strategy and driving.
I agree – which kind of sucks.
I thought this was an engineering challenge not a driver’s challenge.
I don’t see a lot of separation between teams at the elite level. I guess we’ll train our drivers like crazy and hope our opponents screw up at a critical moment.
Of course we’ll try to give them every edge possible with the robot via continuous improvement… but I’m not seeing that as providing any more than incremental gains. Very balanced indeed… Ugh.
-John
Last year was, IMO, the hardest technical challenge FIRST gave us (really controlling a ball that you can’t really grab, kicking, traversing bumps, and hanging were all difficult enough that few teams did all of them effectively). As a result, spectators at many regionals did not get to watch a competitve, high-scoring game until the playoffs, if at all. I wonder if this fact influenced the GDC’s thought process…
This year is, IMO, the simplest technical challenge FIRST has given us in a long time. Merely hanging a tube and getting a minibot to climb a pole on a flat field are much simpler bars of success compared to last year. On top of that, there are plenty of resources (videos, photos, even a book) leftover from 2007 that teams can use to help them design tube-manipulating mechanisms.
The result is that even at early regionals or those with more high team numbers, you are far more likely to find competitive matches. To FIRST, I’m sure that is a “win”.
For the teams on the other end of the spectrum, we just need to work that much harder to set ourselves apart from the crowd - making incremental improvements, as John said.
I must respectfully disagree to an extent…The engineering challenge is a small part of the vast cultural change we’re making. This involves students, mentors, community members, universities, corporate sponsors, and a few others - people, not machines. Of course you know that John. I just don’t want others reading this thread to lose focus that a large part of that work is already done-build phase - teaching and mentoring. I know this season has been a HUGE life-changing process in the 33 students on my “rookie” team.
The competition adds a bit more learning and more cultural change. In my opinion it is icing on the cake.
To the OP, I think that this will be an exciting year and very competitive teams and regionals will blossom. Wish I could be at St. Louis to watch the fun this year. Einstein will be crazy to watch, even more fun if you’re in it.
To add to alot of the comments here already. I think FIRST by creating the game this year that they have, eliminated the engineering thought process except for in the minibot deployment and building.
I think any team that was around for any reasonable time in 2007 will be right to do well and many of the robots that we saw win regionals and championships in 2007 will be copied.
From everything I have seen here there are really on 4 robots to be built this year.
1 - 148/1902 style 4 bar linkage
2 - 233 style extending arm
3 - a single jointed arm
4 - 25/118 style multi stage elevator
I think this year will be competitive, it will help some of the teams that have difficulties during build season, because they will be able to rely on past years learnings from other teams and see what works and what doesnt. But in the end it reduces the total amount of engineering ingenuity present in this community, because we are all still engineers and probably strongly believe “Dont try to reinvent the wheel”
Hoping for a fun season ahead regardless 
We have seen pictures and videos of many good looking and well performing robots. But what about the 1950-odd teams that haven’t posted anything? I don’t think that we have been looking at a representative cross section of the population. To be sure, some great robots remain to be seen, but I suspect that most of the teams that struggled the most are among the “missing” on CD.
I think this was a very difficult technical challenge. It really involves three completely independent functions (4 if you count the drive chassis) - Tube manipulator, Minibot deployment system, and Minibot. You can’t ignore any of them. However, since there are some natural limits that may tend to normalize the high end of what can be achieved, strategy and teamwork will become a larger factor as the season wears on. That will be fun to watch.
I honestly love this years game, it is going to allow robots do what they were built for (score tubes without interference) but make the path to and from the scoring zone one heck of an experience.
I do have 2 problems with it, however.
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the game pieces are too similar to 2007’s game. This is causing a lot of similar bots to be built among the more experienced team, as some already know what it takes to pick up a tube with a bot while others just copied what seemed to work in 2007. Now this is more of a hinder on the creativity that goes into building a robot, more than it effects actual gameplay.
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the minibot just seems like a bad idea to me. Now I could be wrong, but I feel that minibots will start to look more and more alike as the season move on and that a team that gives an absolutely amzing tube placing spectacular could still lose to a fast minibots. I would feel much better about it if the scores where 20 15 10 5 as opposed to 30 20 15 10, but maybe i should just have some faith in the GDC and assume those are the perfect scores to make the elims all gut wrenching games
On the other hand, if all robots have roughly the same minibot, then tube scoring ability will decide the matches.
I somewhat agree with you in that there was a lot of very easy to come by inspiration for this game but I think that is becoming the norm for every game. Last year many teams were inspired by Robocup teams that have been figuring out how to kick soccer balls for years. We have to pick up and score balls or move a large ball in a huge number of games. FIRST recycles game elements and that is a good thing because teams get to improve on designs every year.
My team was very much inspired by 25’s lift from 2007 but in no way would I say that trying to design and build ours was as easy as just building their design. Our team captain put in many hours CADing a lift that though inspired by 25’s was designed for our game strategy and our construction techniques and abilities.
I see many teams doing similar designs but the differences are very noticeable, if you are looking for them.
This game is very different from 2007. It may use a similar game piece but the dynamics will be very different. Defense and power is much less important, where speed will be critical. Having a free shot during the hanging process and having much smaller end caps on the pegs, means it will be much easier to get a tube on a peg than it was in 07. I think a lot of teams figured that out and designed for it. I will say that there is no way that I would want to play Rack and Roll with our 2011 robot. It might be able to pick up the tubes but it was not designed for how Rack and Roll was played. I don’t think that the best robots from 2007 will be the best robots in 2011, teams that designed for this year’s game dynamics will have the most successful seasons.
What will really change the game is the scoring pieces. I will eagerly recommend that our partners do not throw tubes out onto the field outside of our feeder lanes unless they opposing alliance can pick up off the ground. It makes their job so much easier since tubes are right next to their scoring rack.
Our team poked around the Behind the Design book from 2007 but weight started nagging us!
Even if this proves to be true (which I don’t think it will - the robots shown here on CD represent about 1% of all teams), is that necessarily a bad thing? The same argument has been made every year, and to the untrained eye was the most noticable last year.
This year it’s all about implementation and execution. One of my students who had just seen the 118 video asked me if an arm like they’ve got, or a lift like we’ve got, is a better system. My answer was that it all depends on who can execute their design better.
This is one reason I love the fact that spectators are encouraged to visit the pits. Up close, the individual innovations and intricacies will be exciting - both from a mechanical and controls perspective.