Copying Robots

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
81

[FONT=“Times New Roman”]*When I was solicited to be the Robotics sponsor for my high school, I had no idea about the time commitment that was required. Never, ever will I regret that because the effort has been worth it for my students.

This year, a new mini-block class was introduced. Jumping through many hurdles (still), I now have a class in Robotics. It is not a pre-engineering class nor is it a class in computer programming. I wish I could teach those, but I teach math.

The majority of my students do not really know what a robot is. They know nothing about motors, servos, gears, etc. So, we are starting from zero knowledge for the most part.

We do have a protobot which I mentioned rebuilding over the Christmas break, and we have the gift from Santa (booster kit), so I could show them actual parts.

We have watched many videos, and I thank bellpride (team 254) for sharing ways to assist in finding the videos and downloading them. Kudos to you for taking the time to help us.

The students wish to compete NOW, but class started Jan. 4th, so being realistic, we are creating our own self competition. Until I can obtain additional funds, we will be limited to one robot. We have decided to do a timed ‘Clean Sweep’. The idea is to give each driver/coach the chance to get as many points as possible in a 3 minute period.

We hope to be able to have an assembly and charge $2 per student to attend this competition. Lots of details to work out…

In the meantime, sharing your ideas,knowledge, the videos, pictures, etc. is priceless for my students.

We are checking out a rolling lab of wireless notebooks on Friday classes. Last week, they learned to read product descriptions on Motion (primarily motors and servos and more motion).

Next Friday, the goal is to have them join this forum and learn to use it. I will ask them to use a member name starting with ths (Theodore High School) and encourage them to post with questions. Please be patient as they learn to do this.

Thanks to all of you who share. We may copy some ideas, but certainly will not copy an entire design. Our goal is to compete next year and get other schools involved.

We are virgin territory with no known VEX competitions closer than Atlanta which is a 6 hour drive.

Many Thanks!

Ann*[/FONT]

82

I can tell you that you have found a very supportive community, and your area’s RECF representative, Rick Folea, is a great guy who knows just about everything about running a VEX program. If you have never spoken to him, send me an email at rick_tyler at roboticseducation dot org, and I’ll put you in touch.

For what it’s worth, six hours doesn’t sound that bad! Except for events we host, we always have to travel 3-8 hours to play. We’ve developed real skills at finding cheap buses and motels.

I love your idea for a simple classroom competition.

Be careful, though. I volunteer with a team that started with five kids and a budget of $700 and we now have more than 50 students and 8 robots. (We had nearly 70 students before we spun off two new clubs.) This VEX thing can take over your life. In a good way.

83

Thank you! And yes, it seems to have taken over my life, but I am sure it will get easier in time.

Thanks to Foster, Rick Folea has been in contact with me via email, and I have talked to him on the phone. Tomorrow, after school, a representative is meeting with me concerning curriculum and talk about developing this territory. He will arrive at my school early enough to meet my Honors Algebra class (33 students) who will be relieved to get a break from fast paced Algebra. They are all 9th graders, and this will be their first time to see the Protobot as well as a couple of neat videos by team 2158 and 254A, maybe a couple of more if we have time.

Also, numerous VEX forum members have emailed me with great ideas, and that is more help than anyone can know.

I am really impressed by VEX forums and how helpful everyone is being. We are definitely on our way…

Thanks, Again!

Ann

84

Can’t remember if I posted it before, but glad you’re here in the community!

Yolande

85

As we look forward to 2011Championship, I’m going to jump into this thread because of the references to judging and awards at the 2010 Championship.

Where I’m coming from:
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 3 years as a VEX/RECF volunteer. I’m often in the judging room at big events and small ones in the Mid-Atlantic region. I don’t judge, but rather I help with organizing the judges and the awards process. This includes the World Championship. I don’t have a team. They are all “my” teams. I have also been involved with FIRST for 10 years (including as a judge for FRC and FLL) and am also a judge for other STEM competitions, including eCybermissions.
**
How can your team help with judging at the Championship?**
You can help recruit volunteers who might be interested in being a judge. Have people sign up at: http://robotevents.com/volunteer/ Marc Couture, the Volunteer Coordinator, will be happy to answer any questions the potential judge may have or refer the question on.

It will take over 400 volunteers to staff the 2011 Championship and almost a quarter of those will be judges. Folks who have experience with VEX are usually at an advantage with judging because they may require less training, but often there are excellent judges who are new to the program. I can guarantee they will meet some very interesting people!

I’ve recruited judges from the defense industry, the military, the corporate world, from education, from STEM organizations, from youth oriented programs, from cutting edge robotics labs, from tech marketing companies, from government (FBI, NSA) as well as mentors from teams.

I’ve recruited judges who can offer internships and scholarships and sponsorships.

The only requirements are that they are able to work as a team and enjoy interacting with youth. All judges must disclose any relationship with teams, and will be excluded from judging a team they have a relationship with.

Please appreciate that these judges will be working very hard running on their feet for 3 days, will also be required to have some pre-training, and the most will be paying their own way, including airfare and hotels.

Secret hints for helping your team win awards

• Read the criteria for the awards posted in Appendix E. Decide which awards you think your team might be competitive for. The judges try very hard to spread the awards around to qualified teams. Some deserving teams may be in the running for numerous awards, but will likely only receive one. The VRC awards continue to evolve, and this year there are some new awards.

• Learn to be great ambassadors for your team. When judges approach your pit, stand up. Don’t sit there with your feet up on the table. Get rid of the gum. Make eye contact. Speak up. The judges may ask a specific or a general question. Answer the question, succinctly. Don’t ramble. This is called the “elevator pitch” and doing it well is a skill that will carry over in your life to internship, college and job interviews.

• Proud of your widget or strategy or whatever? Tell the judges you think you have the best widget or strategy or whatever at the event, and then explain why. A short handout summarizing your team and explaining your widget or strategy or whatever may be helpful to the judges. Be honest. You can talk about challenges, but even better to talk about how you tried to problem-solve. Be sure to thank the judges. Again, they are donating dozens of hours of time, taking time off from work and most are paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket for the privilege of talking to you. For some of the awards there will be verification procedure to make sure what you are telling the judges isn’t pure fiction. The judges will also be verifying information with the field crews.

**Some random observations and explanations:

  1. The majority of judges at the Championship have no idea about the history or track record of most of the teams. Assume that you will need to communicate to the judges anything you think it is important for them to know. All the teams at the Championship earned their way there by the criteria developed by the VRC, and the playing field for judging starts out pretty level.
  2. There are some judges who may read these forums. Even if you state your comments don’t reflect the viewpoint of your team, they do. That’s not how being on a team (or working for an organization) usually works.
  3. As some have done a great job of pointing out, there are a variety of cultural norms for acceptable behavior and last year the judges got a briefing on some of these cultural norms. The VEX World Championship is very impressive because of the variety of cultures and people attending. Use the opportunity to meet as many different types of people as you can! For example, don’t assume “the Chinese” teams are all one group. Last year there were a variety of different ethnic groups within the Chinese teams represented.
  4. Judging is done under very tight deadlines. Understand that the process involves tracking down 400+ teams, and interviewing them-many from different cultures and needing interpreters. Judges then deliberate in small groups and then in larger groups. Teams are selected for awards by consensus.
  5. Be proud of your accomplishments, both small and large. Some teams get to travel a lot through their involvement in robotics, and for some, this will be their first trip ever on a plane or out of state. There will be middle school, high school, and college age all at one event. Enjoy the experience!**
86

there should be a “thanks” button on this forum like some others
that post was really helpful
especially for some of our newer team members :slight_smile:
THANKS! :slight_smile:

87

Murdomeek!

I have a collection of smilies sent to me by my forum users. Absolutely, adorable and fun. Perhaps, when I have time I can share along with the instructions to implement here.

Tonight, I wanted to make a note of our progress, thanks to a lot of people here…

We have done driver practice 3 days out of the last week. As a coincidence, a consultant working with us about math failures caught me in the hallway. I invited her to our robotics driving practice in the gym lobby.

As I watched her observe my students learning to drive a robot, I was thrilled, even more than she was. My autistic student was definitely in control while driving. He has problems with coordination when not driving, but when he is driving, he is right on target. He keeps saying, “I want one of these.”

The students worked with each other, gave each other advise, and it was truly a team effort. They cheered each other along, and as others, not in my class observed asked to give it a try, the class helped them along.

After several weeks of learning about omni wheels, holonomic drive, motion, sensors, tank tread, logic, etc., it is FUN seeing these students enjoy driving the robot, and even more impressive to experience a consultant observing and realizing how enthusiatic and anxious this diverse group of students are.

Project based learning, applied math and science… Yep! We are doing it and my students are learning more than they realize.

Thanks for all that YOU do!

Ann

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There a cute story that I would like to tell, but please realize I teach struggling students for the most part.

As I listen to my math students say, over and over again “when can we ever use this”, I changed my lesson plan for the Friday before Grad Exam week.

This was meant to be a surprise, a special treat… Something that I truly wish I could do more.

A special package had arrived at my school. I am rarely absent, but had to be out for 8 days.

They were working with the graphs on translations, reflections, you know the routine transformations in the coordinate plane.

I went behind my desk and grabbed a package of the new OMNI wheels. I was opening it as an administrator arrived to to a “spot check”.

I passed one wheel to the the left of the class and one wheel to the right, and asked them to examine them, try to think about how they worked.

As I explained how they worked, in general terms, they felt the rollers and were fascinated.

We then turned on my SmartBoard and showed videos of robotics competitions so that they could relate to real world translations and competitions, they were in awe (thank you bellpride and others).

If they had their way, they would do this every day. No work on their part, but as I watched the students’ amazement as to what other schools were doing, what they could do, I was in awe.

But the truth of the matter is that they were amazed at what other students of the same age were doing. Most of my students see absolutely no reason for math or science other than to graduate.

It was a real cool experience, and I wish that I had time to do this more often.

Ann

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Plain and simple, do you want to be the team that has to cheat to win? Or do you want to be the team that everyone wants to be, that created their own design? Its up to you. I know i would wanted to make my own designs, not copy, infact i would rather lose any day, than know that im winning by cheating. Think about that. especially those teams that are thinking of copying another teams robot, its just no worth it.

90

This topic comes up 2-3 times a year on the forum. Aside from the logical argument that there are only a certain number of ways to address any particular design problem using VEX parts, and that much of what is called copying really isn’t, I want to point out that there are no rules in the VRC that teams build totally unique robots. It is definitely NOT cheating to be inspired by someone else’s design and building a similar robot. I would even argue that it is dumb to stick with an inferior design once you’ve had a chance to see what others have done that works better. It’s real-world engineering.

You may or may not like robots that are similar, but there are no rules against it. In fact, there is a new award this year (Inspire) which will be given at World Championship to the team which provided the most engineering inspiration this year.

91

I understand that there is no rule for copying robots, but thats besides the point of rules. If you copy a robot eactly then that is totally just wrong, and your cheating. I understand the whole inspired by another design, but these a difference between having an idea and making your own design, and having an idea and making the same exact robot as the other team. Our team knew that no team could copy our robot, so we didn’t care. But for others like 2438, ive seen exact copies of their robot. I mean its ok to be inspired and making your own design, but its not ok to copy the robot, piece by piece.

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That is a narrow view of how the world works and of what is/isn’t “wrong” or “right”.

Familiarize yourself with other cultures, with other points of view, and come back with arguments that account for those other points of view (you don’t have to agree with them, but you can not simply wish them away), and that are logical extensions of a premise we can all agree on, and then we can and will have a fine discussion/debate.

Simply continue to assert that your are right, and about all I can do is assert that you are mistaken. So I will.

Be careful who you chose to insult by calling them “cheaters” … some people have long memories, and think that youth is a reason for humility and thoughtful observation, not for brashness. Others, not so much. Your mileage may vary.

Blake

93

For an Industry Business Analyst view of imitation, see also
“How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge”
by Oded Shankar, C 2010, Harvard Business Press, 256 pages.

I haven’t read it, but the Abstract brings up many of the same points as this thread. My favorite soundbite: “How to avoid the risks of imitation, including being imitated yourself”; Least favorite soundbite: “Don’t reinvent the wheel” ; bah, that could be a lot of fun: ref Omni, Mechanum, Hi-Traction, Low profile, low mass, …

Copying/Imitation is alive and well in Industry, so the concepts you learn in VRC can be valuable later in life as well.

94

I think you’re misinterpreting the soundbite a bit. The soundbite is “Don’t reinvent the wheel”, not “Don’t improve the wheel”.

Why waste time intentionally steering yourself toward a different, suboptimal path, just because someone else already walked the way you were going?

95

Right. I seem to misinterpret frequently.

Thats an interesting soundbyte, also prone to my mis-interpretation.
Two good examples are worth a thousand words of syntax description.

The book mentioned probably has an exact answer to your question, probably something about Patent Avoidance.

96

Hey,

I seen this happen to titian’s robot he had a video on youtube and 10 different teams from around the world had the same exact designat the 2011 worlds alot of people didnt like the fact that they copied titian but there was nothing they could do to help him.

the positive way to look at this is if your robot is great like titian’s robot then it would continue to be great.

Titian won Programming and Robot skills for 2011 and the copies had nothing on him although they were the same it would never be like the #1 robot.

Well thats how i see it

Thanks

97

My view on this topic is that teams should always be trying to design the best robot. This means that if you have an idea that you think is better than anything out there, go with it. But if the robot that you first design simply does not work and cannot work as well as other robots you see it is getting you nowhere keeping the same unique, ineffective design. When you see a robot that works better than anything you imagined, it is okay to implement parts of the robot in your design. The idea is not to copy an entire robot, but to take the best parts of every robot out there and add to them your own ideas. Last year, team 44 Green Egg Robotics was very friendly and helpful to our team at our first meet ever, where we scored a total of 0 rings. We realized that our design for our robot simply wasn’t as good as the others, so we adapted, building one of the more successful robots in the region. Our robot was not a copy of Green Egg’s, but it did resemble it and had many of its elements. It also had elements of other robots as well as our own designs. This year our first robot, while being unique, did fairly poorly at our first competition. We decided that it was overcomplicated and could never work as well as other robots we saw, so we scraped it and started over. To keep an inferior robot is unproductive. A team must be willing to adapt to be successful.

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i saw your robot and it did quite well you had some of the same flaws 44 had (not being able to score the wall goals) but not the whole cool putting the base under the latter part. but it was effective none the less.

and thats the bottom line about vex you redesign to out preform your competition. you do what you must to win. but the idea of copying is annoying and i would never do a screw by screw copy id rather fail on my own than copy to win.

99

The thing I believe about copying robots is that if you do not understand the design choices made by the original creator, (which most copiers don’t), you will never make a clone that is quite as good as the original, and you are not going to win anything. Case in point, the expanding intake on Java. One robot that was “inspired” by Java did not have this feature, and so threw intake tracks in most of the matches it played.

100

To add onto that, you never know how much of a robot’s success is won by software control. Last year were were rather tickled to see a team that had copied the design of our A robot; the problem was that it didn’t work. That robot depended heavily on its PID arm control to function. When the cloning team tried to duplicate the robot, the arm flopped around like a noodle.

Perhaps coincidentally, we received an email asking us to email our entire robot code to another team a couple months before we saw that robot…