:deadhorse:
I am curious to see how opinions on no-bag correlate to practice robots.
I have not added an “undecided option” and I apologize for that.
:deadhorse:
if you meant to attach a poll, I can’t see it
Should be there now 
My team has built partial practice bots in the past and are planning on building a full one this season and I have mixed feelings on the bag until I see how 2020 and 2021 play out.
Care to elaborate why?
Because, unfortunately, I can’t see the future and don’t know how the ripple effects of the numerous impacts of this change will play out until they actually do.
Can you define “practice bot” in this case?
I actually have a time machine and I can safely tell you that not much changed for The Zebracorns in 2020. Check out this quote:
See. Time machine.
I intentionally left it undefined. Its not about the robot, Akash. 
But in all seriousness, practice-bot status is very thinly veiled way of measuring “how much [iterative] work do you do after bag day.” If you only have a drive train but your programmers spend hours working on auton, then I would say “yes.” If you have a copy of a mechanism that you use to improve its functionality, then also counts as a “yes.”
If you have spare parts for the sake of spare parts - then, in my mind, its a no.
Tell me what you know now. RIGHT NOW.
FIRST should do this poll as an exit survey for 2019. Exactly as you have written it.
The survey in the past was a little confusing and not directly to the point.
The survey should then be used to see how it can better set rules and terms for the new No Bag rule in 2020 and beyond.
A 50-50 split means something entirely different than a 90-10 in terms of FIRST needing to step in.
So I think the CD-divergence from the regular FRC population is Really evident here.
According to your poll, only like 13-15 percent of teams Don’t build a practice robot.
I would submit that this is exactly upside down compared to the real population.
Is there any real data on this?
[strike]You forgot an option for teams that build two practice bots.[/strike]
edit: Reading comprehension is hard. My bad.
Though some teams that build 3 will likely drop down to “only” two and will still fall under the “will still build a practice bot” category.
Strong disagree with conducting it exactly as written. First off, the two questions can be separated easily when using a true polling service, rather than CD. Next off, there’s definitely a lot of grey area when it comes to what type of “practice bot” teams make, and that should be reflected in the polling. Lumping it together doesn’t allow for meaningful conclusions to be drawn.
Per the FIRST broadcast, they stated that their polls indicated that approximately 50% of teams build “some kind of second robot.” The grey area for defining a second robot is notable, but the data is still clearly different than what is being reflected in this poll.
FIRST said in their blog post announcing the change that about 50% of teams build a practice bot.
For many reasons, mostly specific to the functioning of our team / school, 610 doesn’t build practice bots. But we also schedule our build season to try and get ~1-2 weeks of full driver practice before bagging the robot. We probably drive our competition bot more than almost any other team, we’ve learned over the years that you need to design your robots to be robust over the long term and keep an eye on gearbox / drivetrain / motor wear.
Maybe we can put together some documentation on our lessons learned over the years not building practice bots, while also putting lots of miles on our competition robot.
This is CD. Of course the poll is unscientific and self-selecting. I went into this knowing that.
I put an s in parenthesis next to “robot” to cover that scenario.
Two questions with two options results in the exact buckets in this pole… how does the make a difference?
Stratifying out by 4 or 5 definitions of practice bot given the small number of likely responses (what’s the response rate for FRC surveys? I’m betting sub 2k responses) it will result in too many buckets to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Somebody was really expecting something different???
It’s very interesting to see the breakdowns. The % of practice bots was particularly eye opening. That illustrates why removing the bag doesn’t really help the top teams much–it didn’t mean much to them. As much as the larger population of FRC teams might think, this really, really, really isn’t about the top teams trying to gain a further advantage. It’s about trying to help the lower performing teams without crippling the better performing programs. It doesn’t help to pull programs DOWN if our real goal is improving educational outcomes. We need to figure out how to lift UP programs.
Jonathan,
I would be very interested to see this documentation. There is not a lot out there with regards to wear and tear on robots. I’d love to see a best practices for wear prevention particularly with drivetrains.
Thanks,
Drew
I would consider 3946’s 2014 “Woody” robot a practice robot, though the only things we really iterated on it was driving and repairing. It was built as a prototype, and had almost entirely wooden structural members, had shaft-through-hole-drilled-in-wood where Buzz had bearings, but it was way better drive practice than nothing.
Having said that, 3946 has built, or at least attempted to build, a practice robot each year from 2014 to 2018. (Rookie year was 2012). I would say that I lean very slightly towards being in favor of the change. I’m definitely with Sean that (as Yogi Berra might have said), we won’t know for sure until we find out.
Added: Since 2015, 3946 attempted to have one robot working around week 4*, and iterated on the other, swapping drive** vs development robots as needed until bag, then sharing the practice robot between the two functions until competition. I expect that they’ll continue to do the same except for the need to share a robot at no extra cost, though they might also cut robot costs by about a third*** and only do one robot, and start sharing about two weeks earlier.
- Successful 3 times out of 4 in this; overreached in 2018.
** The drive robot was also the programming (autonomous) test platform.
*** Including spares of most parts