So a lot of people have different opinions on how the removal of Stop Build Day will affect a robot’s quality, by which I mean the overall improvement of design, build, programming, driving, functionality and competitiveness of the robot.
What is your opinion?
Robot quality will increase, but the powerhouse teams will increase the most.
Robot quality will increase, but the lower-tier teams will increase the most.
All teams will increase in quality by a similar amount.
There will be no noticeable increase or decrease in robot quality.
Imo not much will change. I used to think that lower level teams would be helped more because they wouldn’t be at a disadvantage of not having more than 1 robot but the more I look at and talk to lower level teams time management seems to be a very large issue. Removing stop build won’t remove the bad time management so I don’t really foresee there being much of a change if any.
Jesus Christ mik that take is hotter than McDonald’s coffee. However I do think it makes sense. More time spent working means more resources are needed in order to sustain that.
An increase in available resources (in this case, time) often does not result in increased productivity or quality. I’d be surprised if many teams outside of the usual strategic players started utilizing the lack of a bag to make substantially better robots. Not that it wouldn’t be a pleasant surprise, I’d love to be wrong.
I don’t think competition weekend will sneak up on teams more than bag day ever did.
The key is that, after the 1st competition, teams will actually have time to improve their capabilities. While currently teams can’t really do anything between comps (Except for district teams which get a bare minimum of 6 hours), next year some teams will have 3-4 weeks after their first comp to fix/replace broken mechanisms, test software issues, and practice driving.
Will robot build quality increase? Maybe, maybe not. But the amount of idle toasters on the field will probably decrease.
I think mid-tier teams, those who usually make eliminations, will see the most benefit. They often come up with good designs and build quality robots but some are resource limited by available meeting times or funding so they can’t build a 2nd bot. The extra time will help work out design kinks before events.
Teams with organizational issues, like poor time management or build processes, won’t be helped at all. I don’t see the high end benefiting much because they really can’t get better; 254 last year was already perfect.
As a one-and-done Regional team, “lol what’s a second event?” I could see this really widening the gap between late Districts vs Regionals in terms of robot quality.
I really hope not. I’m going to take the other side and say less teams fold because they actually field a moving/semi-working robot, but only time will tell.
The good things I expect: more functional autonomous routines, fewer poor driven matches, especially at the start of competitions.
The bad: potentially, lower resource teams will have less-finished or equally-unfinished robots. Overall competition quality could drop in certain situations as a result.
I think teams who have dialed in a good build system will be slightly better in quality but I think the biggest noticeable change would be in their driver skill.
Teams who utilize prefabricated plans (Ri3d, Everybot)*** will improve drastically, and there will be more diversity in mechanisms and more spare parts brought in.
Teams will experiment more with the unknown for better or worse (like teams doing swerve or drop drives btw potential golden age for developing drive bases a la NEOs)
And yeah…
*** Look at me… Did I say we could have a conversation about how Ri3d ruins FRC or that everybot is a divine blessing? No, don’t derail the thread.
I doubt this will be significantly different. The teams that already produce functional autonomous modes will probably set only a small amount of additional time aside for it next year. The teams that don’t produce functional autonomous modes will continue to not set aside enough time.
My guess - robot quality decreases next year. And I’d actually agree, we may see a higher than average attrition of teams related to the bag [1].
But Schreiber, didn’t you say the bag going away was good for the program? [2]
Robot Quality will go down for two reasons:
There’s going to be a LOT of teams that bite off more than they can chew next year. Right now bag day gives an artificial limit and for the people who’ve been screaming about building within your means for the last couple decades now it really is the big bad lurking at the end of build. That’s going away now. Teams are GOING to over reach.
The other reason quality will go down is that these machines are going to have MUCH more run time on them. How many hours of run time does your competition bot have on it? Whatever number you just thought of, it probably isn’t even that. My favorite bot to go to here is 125’s 2014 robot - Dark Matter. By DCMP it had seen almost 100 matches. At 135 seconds per match, that is just 4 hours of run time. With unbag, let’s be generous and say 25 hours of run time, heck, let’s double that and say 50 hours. How long do you think it would have on it if it was sitting and acting as a practice bot? If we even say 6 hours of drive practice a week, by DCMP (week 7) we’re at ANOTHER 40 hours of drive time. And if you’re only practicing or testing 6 hours a week… well, ask 195 about their hours sometime.
Robots are going to fall apart.
Teams will adjust, the no bag will become the new normal and overall teams will improve. But next year? That’s gonna be rough for some teams. [3]
[1] Not that we’re ever given this data by HQ
[2] I’m pretty sure I said this. But, you know, I also regularly have entire conversations with my cats about work stuff… Take from that what you will.
[3] Please make me eat my words, I will be happy to be wrong.
Those teams that have limited resources will feel left behind and will be much more likely decide that FRC is too much for them to handle.
Many of those low resource teams and many of those that think they no longer need to make a practice robot will show up to their event with a robot that is busted and just plain worn out.
I was just going to mention the robot wear issue. Our 2016 practice robot’s turret basically just tore itself off at Beach Blitz, and I’ve heard various grumblings from district teams about parts wearing out by champs that normally wouldn’t (gearbox bearings, oval screw holes, etc). I doubt many practice robot teams will consolidate to a single robot, and the “refresh” many teams perform before DCMP and half champs will become more widespread as motor degradation becomes apparent.
