My name is Janna Hutz, and I’ve been involved with FIRST for six years and a mentor with team 830 for three years. I’d like to first say that I have always held gracious professionalism to be extremely important, and I am willing to stake my FIRST reputation as well as my personal reputation on everything I post, including the following. I am writing this with my co-mentor Julie Pannuto, also involved with FIRST for six years and for three years as a mentor. She is also one of the most honest and well-meaning people that I know, and countless people in FIRST can account for her gracious professionalism to date.
First, we’d like to thank Don Wright, one of our engineers, for posting a clarification/apology on these forums. Hopefully many of you have read what he wrote, all of which is completely honest. However, we refuse to let him accept all of the responsibility for the situation. We are mentors, and we feel that we should accept at least as much responsibility (if not more, due to the extent of our FIRST experience.)
The reason we’re writing now is to clarify further some of the things he wrote and to correct some of the incorrect assumptions people made when they first posted.
We think there are three issues involved in this situation, which are:
- Is it OK to bring another robot to the competition site?
- Is it OK to use this robot for replacement parts for your competing robot?
- Is it OK to play a robot in practice rounds that will not be played in seeding/finals rounds?
Issue #1:
We cannot see how anyone considers this illegal. To our knowledge, you can bring anything you want to the competition site (with the exception of outside food and beverage!) Many teams did bring second robots, and some were required to remove them. However, we cannot see how the act of bringing the robot into the site is illegal, and we are curious to see if anyone disagrees. This brings us to…
Issue #2:
Rule R09: During the six week period following Kickoff: You may fabricate spare parts for replacement purposes of items on your robot as long as they are exact replacements for parts on the robot you shipped to the event. They must be brought to the event in a completely disassembled state as individual components (no bolt-on assemblies).
We think this rule is very clear. My interpretation is that a practice robot cannot be brought to the competition and used for replacement purposes. I have read other posts where other people have different, more liberal, interpretations, and obviously FIRST needs to clarify this. However, we would like to refer people to Don’s post, which stated that the only items removed from our practice robot and added to the competing robot were the RC and a few PWM cables. This is completely true; we did not intend to use our practice robot to replace any of our parts, and we did not do so. Additionally, Don failed to mention something else. Many people seem to think that our practice robot was an improved version of our final robot. In reality, we finished our practice robot first and fabricated and made the final robot in the last few weeks before we shipped, taking into consideration problems we noted on the practice robot. Team 469 worked at our facility the weekend before ship date, and if you happen to talk to any of them, I’m sure they could tell you that we were testing mechanisms on our practice robot while the final was still in pieces.
Issue #3:
Apparently this is where most of the gray area is, since there is no official rule on the subject. Our personal opinion is that the answer to this question is yes – it is ok to play a robot in practice rounds that will not be played in seeding/finals.
Obviously it is allowed to build a practice robot and to keep it and work on it after you’ve shipped your competing robot. So, if teams can work on and practice with a practice robot for 2 weeks before competing, why can’t they practice with it for 30 minutes on Thursday? Honestly, we’d been working on our programming after ship with the practice robot, and the only thing we were still working on on Thursday was our autonomous code, and we could have gladly done so in the pit all day.
If anyone had approached our team and questioned our using the practice robot at any point during the day on Thursday, we gladly would have abstained from using it until we got a ruling. It is unfortunate that people went through the process of filing a complaint with FIRST on Thursday, the outcome of which did not reach us until Thursday night, when the practice robot was on its way out of the building. It is also unfortunate that people who obviously think we were in the wrong did not approach us at any point during the entire competition and waited until now to post their opinions on a public forum. We believe that the atmosphere of cooperation in FIRST would dictate that teams attempt to resolve situations amongst themselves before approaching FIRST.
We are sorry that we upset other people with this situation; it was not our intention. However, it has obviously raised good discussion that I’m sure FIRST will take note of when creating the rules in future years.
Best of luck to everyone in your upcoming competitions, and we look forward to working with you all in the future.
Janna Hutz & Julie Pannuto
Mentors, Team #830, AVL North America & Huron High School
) when i heard about it, i felt bad for them. i wouldnt mind if they used it, and i think most other teams wouldnt either. in any case, i think that a practice/back-up bot should be allowed during practice rounds in order to get ur shipped bot ready to kick some… :yikes: