What would you say is the minimum and the optimal amount of people needed at competition?
I’m not quite sure what you mean. I think the more people at each event is better. Get as many people as you can. Members of the team, friends of team members, parents, siblings, other teachers, administration, etc.
The “minimum” is as many as possible and the optimal is the same.
In the pit however, is an entirely different story. You want 3 or 4 students maximum and 2 or 3 mentors. Anything more than that and no work can be done. 
Team 461 has a simple system on who goes to the comp:
- The Pit Crew
Like said above, this is a small core group. It should include a couple mentors, your drive team, and a few other students. I think ours generally comes out as 10 people. They leave Wednesday night or Thusrday Morning of competition and the rest of the team, which isn’t needed at that time technically, comes the Friday of competition.
It is important to choose your crews carefully.
- General people
Encourage as many as you can to go, but if you’re travellin to Atlanta from somewhere up north and it involves plane tickets, be sure to sort everything out ahead of time. At your home regional? Have at it! :). Be sure to respect the decision of the venue.
Theoretically, your minimum would be one (your human player).
Realistically, I’ve seen teams do a regional with anywhere from about eight (they traveled a really long way) to about forty people. Season to taste.
(Of course, at Palmetto I’m telling all the folks I know to come on out with the free admission and the robots. People dig robots.)
We take as many as we can afford. But the essentials would be
. . .
Drivers, human player, at least one from the following groups, electronics, programming, mechanics, manufacturing. That way if something breaks you have the people that built it there to fix it. Add the manufacturing group and you have a pit crew.
We bring however 2-3 from each group and add Public Relations and Marketing for our cheering section and our mascots. Which for our first regional will be 24 students and 5 mentors and parents. Our second regional is just up the road so we are bringing just about everyone, thats a really big cheering section, about 40.
There was a rookie team at Buckeye from St. Ignatus last year with only one member .
Got a rookie award for it.
Wouldn’t recommend going to competition with only member though.
I think about 8 or 9 people from our team are going and it spreads out over every team so if we have to totally dismantle the robot from pneumatics to drive train to the arm, I couldn’t see doing that with only 2 or three students. Also, no matter how many people go to the event, make sure everyone knows how to put everything back together and where parts go.
Its interesting. I was just thinking about this earlier today. First (I think in the game section) the manual says that a team is four people, but later (I think in the section about the events) it says that at least one person has to report in order for a team to get a score. I would go find those bits but I am almost over my bandwidth limit and I dont have the manual on this computer.
As for what I think your question actually was I would recomend that if you are a small team you should take everyone. Last year we had seven people and we all went. This year we have about six or seven members there every day of the week from two until six and ten til six on weekends and we will probably all go, then we have some sort of fringe elements who show up for the (free) food and to listen to our music and just generally hang out. They probably wont go, though I dont know for sure. You just dont want your pit area too crowded. Give extra people clipboards and have them take notes on and pictures of other teams bots. Our pictures from last year were great for ideas this year, and I wish we had taken notes.
well truely you need the human player, a mentor, driver and operator and you can go to competition but a couple extra people and a mentor wouldn’t really hurt
my team usually bring about 20-30 to each competition but that’s us
Like said above, this is a small core group. It should include a couple mentors, your drive team, and a few other students. I think ours generally comes out as 10 people.
Typically, our team has way less than that be a part of the pit crew. We usually end up having only about 4-5 people max in the pits, including mentors (generally its 2 mentors, and 3 students). If you have too many people in the pit, it may end up becoming way too crowded. The pits are small, and it is difficult to fit everyone in at one time. In fact, our team has a rule about this; if you are not a member of the pit crew, you are not allowed to be in our team’s pit area (unless its just to have a quick word with someone).
When our team was young, our pit crew was also our drive crew and cheering section. We used to only have about 3-4 core members of the team. Now our team has burgeoned to a membership of about 20, with 3 on the pit crew, 3 on the drive crew, and the rest scouting or presenting the chairmains award. These roles tend to overlap a bit…and no one is strictly limited to one job, as long as it is practical. For example, I was the pit captain last year, but I also was one of the chairman’s award presenters.
One concern that people may have over not letting very many people in the pits is that not many students get a chance to have “hands on time” with the robot. One of the things that our team is going to try this year is having two pit crews which will work in rotating shifts. That way, more people get to have “robot time”, and it gives members of the pit crew a chance to relax, eat, and watch the matches.
We don’t quite know how this system will work out yet, but we are hoping it will be a success.
Our team is only 37 people this year, so we are taking everyone who can go to the regionals. So it should only be about 40 people by time you account for mentors and people who aren’t going.
In the pits it is typically just the people who have a working knowlege of the robot. This year it will probably be me, some of the machinists, some of the wiring team, and some people for general stuff.
The bare minimum for participating is one member. However, for playing the game you need at least a driver, a human player, and if you need a secondary driver, then three people. If you have a mentor, then 4 people. Some teamshave anywhere from 4 people, upto 50 people. Sadly my team is about half a mile from the silicon valley regional, and yet we only have about 6 or 7 students plus 2 or 3 mentors. A team from Hawaii came to the Silicon Valley regional a couple years ago and they came with 30 or 40 people, plus their 10 or so member pit crew. Your pit crew shouldn’t consist of more than 5 or 6 students and a mentor. It gets to crowded after that, especially when local kids come down, and start going into the pit and getting in the way of everything. Ideally you want your 7 people tea plus a cheering section of about 15 to 30 people.