Only one, Boom Done, of the 6 72 hour builds used a completely custom chassis and they did it show that it was possible in such a short time. All the other chassis were basically COTS. Part of the reason for the 72 hours builds is promote products which isn’t a bad thing. A more diverse understanding and use of COTS parts helps teams build better robots.
I absolutely love BB/Ri3d, we used some of their ideas very effectively on my team. The only thing that I have against the Ri3D/BB is that certain individuals seem to think that anyone that builds anything worse than one of those robots has “failed”. I will touch on a few reasons why this is ridiculous:
time-These guys build their robots in 72 hours, and from what I saw, most of them literally worked for all 72 hours. Making an estimate of my team’s total hours: 15hrs/week*6weeks - 10 hours in early build season + 10 hours in late build season = 90 hours, with a good chunk of that time going into set-up/take-down. Since we only have maybe 5 students working at any given time, our total man-hours will fall well short of what the 3-day builds do.
experience-Some individuals working on these robots have more years of FRC experience than all of the mentors and students on my team have, put together. Even a few years out, when we have more experienced students, they will start to leave. The groups building these robots will always have more combined experience than the average team out there.
resources- Most teams have to work on a budget, and have to use some of that precious build time waiting for parts to arrive. Also, making quick changes (different motor, different gearing, etc…) for them is easy, but quick changes like this are impossible for many teams.
Again, I love these 3 day build robots, but I don’t enjoy people looking down on us when our robot is worse than one of them.
For 955, Ri3D is used to validate concepts that have gone to prototyping. Our inital design phase is completed in 3 days, so we are usually independent of Ri3D. We really liked Ri3D, because it presented weaknesses with packaging and also early validation data. As an example, our team chose to package our catapult and intake on opposite ends of the robot to eliminate the rock that Team 1.0 had. Initally, we didn’t follow BuildBlitz at all, but we found the cam gear through that channel which is a brilliant mechanism to use with our catapult.
Overall, Ri3D provides good validation data and helps show early problems with specific designs, saving us time and money.
I do have a gripe with Buildblitz though, both robots on there could win regionals without any additional iterations. They are refined bots, and I think they possesed qualities that the Ri3D teams lacked, and qualities that many teams lack, which is polish. The Buildblitz robots are pressed out, they can do everything well and if a team possesses the knowhow or the money, they could re-manufacture the robot with ease. My point here is that the Buildblitz robots are too refined, and they could have too much influence on the sport.
Obviously recreating these robots is another challenge
Sorry if I rambled a bit, it’s late 
I haven’t been involved with FRC very long, but I see plenty of design variation this year (maybe even more than last year, at the top level especially).
I think something worth mentioning is that there are certain mechanisms and certain teams that are copied more than others. I’ve seen far more JVN and Boom Done style builds than say, Team Copioli copies. To me, that suggests that Ri3D serves as a kind of prototyping for many teams - they are exposed to a variety of mechanisms and can determine for themselves what type of mechanisms will suit their strategy the best. I think this is very helpful to teams that do not have the resources to prototype a variety of mechanisms for themselves.
Our team’s robot looks very little like any of the 3-day robots, but we were inspired to use a choo-choo gear to wind our shooter from Team JVN. I think that presenting a variety of working robots to view before the build season gives teams a base to build from, without ruining the game. All of the Ri3D robots are competitive but not dominant designs so teams still need to push them further to be winning - especially if other teams have 3-day style robots to build from as well.
Overall, I think the 3-day robots raise the achievable bar for struggling teams, which is always a good thing - this year especially.
So there’s a few things here with Ri3D: lots of pros, lots of cons. I think Evan here has nailed a handful of the pros - it helps struggling teams, it helps rookies, and it gives ideas for mechanisms not whole machines. And this is why one half of me likes it. The reason the other half doesn’t like it - it limits thinking and innovation, a common theme we are seeing not just here in FIRST, but in our society as a whole.
Just my 2 cents.
It’s sad to see how the well intended philosophy of mentors guiding/sharing experience with students is sliding down hill. Not going to turn this into ugly thread of who/what is right or wrong, I am just moving out FLL!
I still have yet to see any hard evidence that “thinking” or “innovation” were any lower this year than in previous years. I’d really appreciate the next person to bring up this assertion providing non-anecdotal evidence.
I completely agree, most great ideas come from combining other ideas. That requires first that you gain a ton of experience with other ideas. The 72 hour builds do a great job of exposing students to a large set of ideas that they can build on.
Even the teams that build robots that are very similar (I don’t know of any team that exactly copied a robot) to the 72 hour robots they still had a to learn a lot of the details of the design and I’m sure they will be better at designing robots next year. The problems they faced this build season were just as real as other teams and they had to learn to solve them. No one expects the next great innovation in the auto industry to be designed by someone that has never seen a car before why do we expect the same from our students. Take what other people have done, learn from it, and make it better.
I personally am a fan of the 3 day robot builds. I think over the last 2 seasons in which they have been taking place, I have seen the floor of the competition increase significantly. (I also think that the availability of high quality COTS parts specifically designed for use with FIRST robots from the likes of VEX and AndyMark, among others is also a large reason)
I have mentored FRC teams for a total of 8 years (2005-2008 & 2011-2014). Several other of the engineering mentors on our current team have also been involved for similar periods of time. This gives us a large experience base of designs of both robots and mechanisms that have both worked and failed in past years. Over the past several years we have had games that have closely mirrored other games in the not too distant past (see: 2006 & 2012, 2007 & 2011, 2008 & 2014). Because we had mentors that knew the games in the past, we could easily say to our students, “Hey, this game is pretty close to 2008, lets take a look at some robots that played that game well for inspiration”
The robot in 3 days concept gives this same advantage to all teams. Not every team can have a mentor that even would have known about the game in 2008 this year. Luckily, now we have the resource of the 3 day robots to help teams which do not have the luxury of mentors that have been involved in the program for nearly a decade. The team that I was first involved with, 677, was mentored entirely by college students from Ohio State. So not only were we turning over our students every 4 years, we were also turning over all of our mentors as well. These type of projects would have helped both our students and our young mentors get up to speed a little quicker, had they been available at the time.
We all draw inspiration from somewhere. I don’t see how drawing inspiration from a 3-day robot is any different than drawing inspiration from 1114’s 2008 robot, or seeing roller claw mechanisms in 2007 and incorporating them in 2011. Yes, you can argue that the 3-day robots are specifically designed for this game, but as others have said, nothing is a direct copy. Even if a design were to be a direct copy, there is still likely to be a lot of testing and troubleshooting of the systems involved to get them to be as effective as possible.
I don’t tend to get too preachy, but in the end its about inspiration. Some are inspired by the 3-day robots to say, “Hey, that doesn’t look too hard, we could do that”. Others say, "Yeah, that’s a nice design, but I think it would be better with X, Y, and Z changes. Still others will challenge themselves to say “I don’t want to copy the 3-day robots, I want to try something completely different”. Personally, I think teams can learn from any of these ways of thinking.
Anyway, I’ve rambled for far too long now.
Personally, I agree with you–I’m a huge fan of Ri3D. But what non-anecdotal evidence could possibly be offered for either case? It’s not like we’re taking a census here. Would you be looking for something in particular?
I’m just looking for larger scale or aggregate data-- ideally in a statistically valid form. I don’t really expect anyone (either for or against Ri3D/BB) to bring in data, but I think that’s the only way to move beyond rhetoric (where the conversation is now).
As for metrics, there are a couple of higher level ways (that don’t require new data) to look at-- all of which have their own problems-- rookie retention/overall retention versus prior years (problem: is affected by other factors like quality of game and uncontrollable factors), lower quartile scoring ability (doesn’t necessarily mention inspiration or thinking, just competitiveness).
I’d be curious if anyone has an idea of how to analyze the problem while moving away from rhetoric and into more objective analysis (which I realize is difficult and unlikely to actually happen).
Overall I would say it is a positive engineering source of information, but I think they shouldn’t release all of their info within the first week of build when everyone should be brainstorming. That takes SO much away from the actual design aspect giving the easy out of “hey this works so lets do this” instead of trying to come up with something. A little research on past year robots with similar games would provide some similar amount of info, but at least they would need to work at it.
One of the other mentors on our team actually thinks they Ri3D robots should be used by FIRST to actually play test the game to work out the kinks in the system, would be much smoother early week competitionss if this was so.
In hind sight, I think having this resource was nice, but I think it shouldn’t be made available until the end of week 2 of the build season. My 2 cents anyway.
The big issue is isolating the variables.
We could pull retention data but that would be tainted by various grants coming and going last year as well as changes in focus. And it’s impossible to say with any real certainty if a team would have continued without success. (or define success for that matter)
We could pull times the game objective was achieved and compare that to similar years. 2012 work pretty well from a quick glance but has some serious problems at a deeper one. Perhaps 2006 is a good data point? Too old? Idk
Or maybe we could divide teams into historical tiers and see if they’ve had a pair of better years the last two compared to their traditional performance. But then how do we factor in that event performance IS a zero sum game, someone has to lose for you to win after all…
Sorry bro, don’t think I can give you the data you want. Don’t think anyone can. Objectively measuring the impact of Ri3D and its ilk is simply not possible. Subjectively we all have to determine if we should encourage our students to investigate these challenges. But I think that’ll be a student by student question for me. Why do we have to have a definitive answer anyway?
Like I said, I didn’t really expect it to happen. The search shall continue.
I came into the competition season expecting to see a bunch ofBB/Ri3D clones, and so many so that it would make me dislike it. That there would be 4 designs, and teams would just pick and choose.
Instead I saw a few teams who did follow one of the paths, but they can’t have done it without having gained some technical knowledge along their way and/or putting their own twist on the base of the design, whether it be a catcher, new drivetrain experiment, different power system for a catapult, or other function. And all this while, teams still found unique designs (i.e 118, 254, 1678, etc.) and still stand out.
I would like to see them return next year.
While we are on the topic of design process and brainstorming, I will add a few of my thoughts. There is a great read out there Product Design and Development by Ulrich and Eppinger](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0073404772/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0073404772&linkCode=as2&tag=robo0f6-20) that provides a lot of insight into the design process. They list the Concept Generation, or brainstorming, portion of the design process as a five-step methofology:
- Clarify the Problem
- Search Externally
- Search Internally
- Explore Systematically
- Reflect on the Solutions and the Process
A brief description of searching externally
External search is aimed at finding existing solutions to both the overall problem and to the subproblems identified during the problem clarification step.
One of the last subtopics in external search section is “Benchmark Related Products”.
I do agree that it is important for teams to go through the proper steps before starting the brainstorming process (how are you going to play the game, what is the team’s goal for what the robot has to do, prioritizing, etc.).
I am a fan of the 72 hour builds. I learned a lot by watching them, I can’t say that we took what any of them did and placed it on our robot; but we did have some inspiration along the way.
So I was lucky enough to be apart of Robot in 3 Days AND the actual FRC build season and here’s my take on it:
From the stand point of the FRC build season:
My team was watching all the BB/Ri3D builds and the approach they took was to “look but not watch.” What I mean by that is they looked at the builds but didn’t take intensive notes. The students all had something they liked from the different builds but I always asked, “what could be done to make it better?” Our team started with the choo-choo but realized that it was very limiting as opposed to a pneumatic launcher. We liked the JVN collector and stuck with it only after we explored all the possible options. Even though we had several robots done in 3 days to “copy”, we didn’t finish our design until almost week 3. The BB/Ri3D builds overall helped our team by cutting down a lot of prototyping that we would normally do. We could easily look at a video of a mechanism that we were considering and see if it gave us the result we wanted.
All in all, I comes down to how you let the build influence your students. You can’t control how they feel about it but you can force them to think it through by making sure they cover all of their bases on why they want that design for the robot.
From the stand point of a Ri3D build:
Going in, Team O-Ryon’s purpose was to build a robot that could complete the simple game objectives and at the same time, be something a rookie team or a team that was low on resources could build and still be competitive. We knew that we had a lot of people watching and that whatever we build could and would be copied. We also wanted to make it difficult for teams to just sit down and copy it bolt for bolt, screw for screw. That’s why we didn’t CAD it and release any CAD. We got numerous emails and messages about when were going to release CAD or if we could CAD something for them and as tempting as it was, we didn’t. We answered all questions but told teams to improvise because we knew our robot wasn’t the best and that teams could make something better with 6 weeks to build.
Looking back, I’m glad we did the 3 day build because we met our goal. Teams built our robot (some carbon copies) and were able to be competitive at their respective regionals, some even winning. At the same time, the veteran teams were able to take what we did and iterate and take it to the next level. That was the main goal of Ri3D when it all started last year. Not to build a robot FOR a team but to build a robot that a team could see complete the game challenge in week one and to give them a foundation to start with so that the overall competition level at all regionals could be more leveled thus getting all the students a better overall experience of FRC.
Saying that ri3d reduced variation in robot design is entirely confirmation bias. I think a lot of people are greatly overestimating how much design variation there has been in past years. Aside from 2013 I can’t think of a single year that had as many truly unique robot designs as this year.
Team 3018 (Nordic Storm) was inspired by last year’s robot in 3 days-- not their design, but rather the challenge of doing such in 3 days.
This year the students tried to build a fully functioning prototype robot and did a pretty respectable job of it. Their final design was largely based on their 3 day prototype. They used the drive train from our rebound rumble bot and focused on the manipulator and collector during the build, but the prototype was able to nominally do all aspects of the challenge that our final version could do.
3 day prototype:
Final:
It didn’t hurt that we are a community based team and we had snow days Monday and Tuesday so they were able to build from Saturday@noon until Tuesday@noon. The original plan was Sat Noon-late, Sun 1-9, Mon 4-9, Tue 4-9 for roughly 30h or build time over a ~80hr period, but they worked pretty much all the waking hours Sat Noon-late, Sunday 1pm - Tue noon.
In the end, I think the decision to try to not just prototype ideas but prototype a complete functioning robot took us further faster than in years past. It certainly was a lot of fun and we wouldn’t have considered it if it weren’t for last year’s Ri3d effort.