This is going to be huge as long as whoever they partnered with is experienced in robot design and usability.
Whichever vendor they went with for this will also have a big leg up on their competition which makes me uneasy about the equal information access in FRC vendorworld.
Still a good change for teams. Nice job @Collin_Fultz
I love the idea of FIRST doing this!
I also this helps FIRST build at least a semi competitive robot that can more accurately test the game before kickoff. To both find issues (and fix them) but also to be able to give teams more warnings and things to think about when revealing the game. (Instead of teams having to build an extremely expensive complete field to find out how some basic field elements work)
Things I would have like to have seen first “warn” about in past games:
This is one of the single best changes I have ever seen made to this program. Even if the specifics of the kit bot (a real kit bot!!!) don’t perfectly hit the mark this year, the precedent this sets moving forward is massive. Teams with little to no design resources will be able to get driving and scoring easier than ever before, teams can stop throwing away the scrap industrial hardware that usually gets sent out with the kit, and the GDC will have back-and-forth with an outside member designing a real, legal, robot.
I love everything about this.
I wonder if we ever get to know who the community member is. Will it be the same person going forward? Will it be a rotating position?
Color me exceedingly impressed.
Preemptively to anyone who complains about this after the design is released because “xyz isn’t the best way to play the game”, well - just remember, any reasonable design is better than no design.
The floor has been lowered further than I could have imagined.
Collin is gonna need to slow down with all these great changes, otherwise FIRST is gonna be perfect in the next few years and he’ll have to take early retirement.
I like this idea but would be worried about design consistency (ie mounting standards, and other features). Hopefully this also opens to door to a better featureset on the KOP drive chassis - ie smaller mounting holes and better super structure mounting, including better bumper mounting.
I really really hope all vendors (at least those who donate to the KOP) get an equal shot at game information going forward.
At this rate I’m ready for the Regional Points model to be announced next month.
a boat?
water game confirmed!
These seem like game design issues, imo, that FIRST should be designing out of games, as I doubt many teams would take written warnings about issues like this seriously, until they saw it happen in person.
I’m not sure any of these things can or should be designed out of games, at least not without the result being very uninteresting games where we just rehash the same challenges everyone has seen before. I would argue that a significant part of the experience of FIRST is the engineering process and discovery that happens when tackling a new problem with unknown challenges and discoveries you make along the way.
Learning shall occur, whether you like it or not!!
@Peter_Johnson since you commented, I’m curious if there have been any whispers of wpilib support for the new “KOP bot” that you have heard of?
Wondering if similar to Rev and Everybot there will also be code for teams.
So how about having 6 of these pre built and running in matches broadcast just after kickoff?
This is definitely a good move vs. what we’ve been getting in recent years. You know its bad when all you care about in the KOP are the game piece(s) and the container itself.
Rookie teams traditionally are not given the option to opt out of the drive base that is correct.
I agree that new problems and unknown challenges are part of the game but did any of those issue make their game better? Would have balls with less sticky texture in 2020 made that game worse? Would a different internal structural of the rapid react tower that reduced bounce out made that game not a challenge or made the game the same challenge as another game?
This is a great idea! They could even use them to demo the game scoring/rules instead of an animation.
I haven’t heard of anything, but I’m not sure there would need to be any direct support from the WPILib team. As demonstrated the last several years, an example software project can easily be made available for all languages completely independently from the library development.
Hopefully I’m not the only one that misread this as “robot base” instead of “base robot”. I was worried we’d be getting a regolith, corn field, or something else funky.
IMO, the bounce out was the most interesting aspect/challenge of Rapid React. YMMV.