As a New York team my personal experience with RI3D is a little different than what I saw watching other regionals and attending the Buckeye. Quite simply. I don’t really like it. A team can build a JVN bot without changing anything and still seed first or at least easily within the top eight. At other regionals you see the higher end of the spectrum being innovative or at least interesting bots. New York has only a handful of particularly strong teams and RI3D helps keep New York teams making competitive bots. At the same time I don’t really like how it basically tells most of the teams that you can win just by copying someone else. Some things like the JVN intake are things that most teams would’ve figured out but el torro and the choo choo are things that most teams wouldn’t have done themselves.
I help mentor a rookie team that is located 80 miles away from my house. I got involved with the team 3 weeks into the build season. At that point in the season, the drive base was put together and running. And a catapult was built that would throw a ball IF you placed the ball on it and you physically pulled it down against the springs. They had purchased a winch in hopes of finding a way to energize the catapult. As luck would have it we found the JVN video which gave us direction. And yes we copied it.http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/40317 High school students got to see cad drawings for the first time, experiance a neet mechanical device in the Chu- Chu, work with and begin to understand a pneumatic system and compete not just participate.
If not for JVN:cool: we would have had a drive base and a few poles to play defense with. The team has advances 2-3 years over where it would have been without the 3 day build. No brainer!
Building off of this, my team (2046) started off as a RI3D clone, except we shot out of the other end. but what teams didn’t always see was our 6 CIM drive, and the efficiency as to which the robot was made. not to mention that we switched to a new collector that collected better, then to a higher angle catapult, and continued to improve. What was nice about the Robot in 3 days videos was that they created a base standard that allowed a team that had never had their robot ready for their first competition of the season be ready for the first competition (and in fact win it), while figuring out how to further improve our robot to continue to be one of the best in the Pacific Northwest (if that’s not conceited of me to say; I mean, I am a little biased)
One of the favorite memories of this season for me was seeing a local team that had only made eliminations twice win the North Star regional this year, with a robot that was heavily inspired by Boom Done’s.
Seeing them actually contributing and competing was awesome.
This. I was really disappointed by the lack of iteration upon the Ri3d designs by teams in Michigan. Many just copied or made very little changes to the design, instead of iterating upon the 3 day builds. I like the 3 day challenge, i just think teams are missing the bigger opportunities available.
I’m surprised Aren hasn’t jumped in yet. He proudly tells that the “choo-choo” mechanism was one he discovered when he was in middle school.
The three day robot idea is interesting to me. On one hand I really appreciated seeing some of strategic/black box concepts/ideas/wotnot (such as calculating the “sweet-spot”, neutrino made use of that idea and using it to determine ranges). I’m sure many teams benefited from the robot designs as well.
On the other hand it turned me off to watch adults play a “kid’s” game. Its not really inspiring to watch an MLB player hit a home run on a little league field.
This is just ridiculous, to call FRC a “kid’s” game is extremely disrespectful. We do this for the students but the reason so many of the great mentors we have in FRC do it is because it’s not a “kids” game. It’s an extremely hard engineering challenge that we give to students. The challenge keeps a whole lot of very bright people coming back year after year to work right along side students to find a good solution and very rarely do any of them find the “correct” solution. If it were easy a whole lot of people wouldn’t come back every year.
I’m not going to rate our own team, other than we give it our best at every event we attend.
As Allen stated, we took the ORyon idea and worked from there.
We absolutely love our robot, its performance this season, and in hindsight, with no regrets after winning 3 events.
I don’t personally see the problem with Ri3D. It’s like every other thing in FIRST: if it works for your team, use it. Just because you would rather not make a clone of robot in 3 days, that might not be in the best interest for another team. Does varying levels of mentor involvement have an impact on teams? Sure, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Ri3D is no different, IMO
It is a competition aimed at high school students. The challenges are hard, but they should not be mind boggling for a seasoned engineer with experience in the sport. There is no “correct” solution for basketball… but there is a difference between the pros and the high school leagues.
Additionally, the word kids is in quotation marks for a reason. I don’t honestly mean its a game for children.
How is this different from how some teams function normally? Almost all the perineal powerhouses (as well as some teams that don’t always do so well) are driven by dedicated, seasoned engineers with experience in the sport. They do so well because the challenges are easier for professional engineers who have been in FRC for years than for inexperienced high school kids who graduate every four years.
Personally, I’d rather have those professional engineers share their experience with everyone than keep it to their own teams. But pick your poison, I guess.
Last post and I’m out.
I’m maintaining my analogy:
An NBA star coaching a basketball team is wonderful and fantastic. I love that there are awesome mentors out there helping students and working with teams.
Mentors playing robots with students is great, fantastic, and I love it. I like seeing mentors being awesome with students. I’ve worked with teams that have seen the whole spectrum of mentor involvement and have no qualms.
I think robots in three days is weird because it cuts out the students and becomes, like I’ve said, watching an professional athlete play in high school sports.
Mentors playing robots in a high school competition (without students) is weird to me, and I find it off-putting. I’m not trying to imply anything further than the situation of the Ri3D.
At a minimum, it was really interesting to see what the teams could come up with in three days. I’d probably agree that it feels a little odd for the “pros” to take over the game for a few days without any students. Still, it’s only three days of work, so even really brilliant people aren’t going to come up with a world champion caliber robot that fast. It’s more of a baseline that other teams can start from.
Our team certainly benefited from those designs, using a bunch of ideas from the Ri3D and Build Blitz teams. I don’t feel too bad about that, because creating a completely original idea is tough in a competition where so many solutions to similar problems have already been created in the past. Our team had a lot of fun and learned a lot from testing and refining the ideas we used. I think engineering is more tweaking and iterating and refining than outright invention. We made a roller collector, a catapult, and a winch with a ratchet wrench + pneumatic release. All of those were different than the originals in some pretty significant ways, and there was plenty of sweat and TLC put into those modified designs.
I wonder what we would have built without Ri3D? I suspect that we would have looked more closely at a Simbot SS design. We would have been researching previous designs in any case.
I’m particularly glad that roller collectors came out in the 3 day robots. That was a really doable mechanism that any team can pull off, and the more robots that can collect a ball, the better. The 3 day teams didn’t invent the first ever roller collectors for FRC, but they showed everybody that they are effective for this game.
I am still not a fan of the 3 day builds. Our team did watch the videos, but not until the Thursday after kickoff, after we made decisions on what direction we wanted to go. We did it as a team and discussed how these robots would work with our design. I guess if a team does not have the creative design resources, then they are a good thing. It seems like so many teams got stuck in the design influence of the 3 day builds.
I think if they are going to continue with this, the teams doing the three day build should be required to do it with a kit chassis, that way they are truly helping teams that do not have the creative design resources.
This is not a top-down activity, where anyone has the authority to dictate to anyone what they can or can’t do. Nobody has any ability to tell a non-FRC team group of people what to do or how to do it, so there’s no such thing as “requiring” any of these groups to do anything.
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.