I’ve been doing robotics competitions since what, fourth grade? Before I enter my final comopetition season of FRC which might be very cooked (i’ll elaborate later), I’d like to reflect on and share my experiences, and then take a look at why some robotics team succeed and some fail.
Note that all of this is my own opinion, and not representative of any of the teams I have competed on. I’ve tried to keep everything as true as possible, but of course, there may be some inaccuracies.
Also, some parts may be critical of certain people, I’ve tried to be as honest as I can here. Please, do not take offense, you are not the person who would make this mistake, because otherwise, why would I write this? But mistakes are to be learned from, and I’m including them so that hopefully, the next person will not make the same mistake.
I’m really writing this, just in the hope that 41 will not do the same thing again, in my final year.
I started (roughly) robotics in fourth grade, on a VIQC team in the Long Hill Robotics club. Back then, we were still led by Mr. Hadzic (I’ve been told I should call him Dr. Hadzic, but I can’t stop myself due force of habit accumulated over many years).
A bit about VIQC: you get a year to build a like 25x15 ish inch robot? maybe a bit bigger. You get 1 minute autonomous + 1 minute driving, points are added. roughly a summary.
In my first year, with teammate AL, I really had no idea what I was doing at the beginning. AL came up with a moderately complex design, and we started building. I now don’t really recall how much of this happened, but we had roughly a end effector prototyped within a few months, and decided we didn’t need the rest of the design, or didn’t have time, or something. So we stuck with an incredibly simple robot that is literally a claw and arm on a h-drive. This gave us like \infty time to tweak small design details, actually practice driving, and code a very robust auton (we actually beat every middle school team at states). We ended up going to worlds and not qualifying for division brackets.
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That year, LH had several other teams. I don’t remember them in full detail, but most of the teams ended up with very robustly built clawbots. I think the middle school A team had like a reversible ground-parallel arm mechanism with a claw, and the B team had a vertical claw on a linkage. I don’t really remember the C team. I think that all of the LH abandoned more complicated designs after they didn’t really work out… Both the A and B team went to worlds as well (maybe the C team did? i don’t remember).
For reasons, that year was the strongest LH robotics ever was…
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At worlds that year, of course, the chinese teams dominated with the winning teams having mostly a convergent design. A rough description, there was a rotary indexer with three poles that would store rings of different colors, a conveyor intake and a passive claw intake, and the indexer would rotate to dump rings on poles. You get the point, probably. Back then, everyone would say that these bots were “dad-bots” and were built by parents, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if many of the stronger teams were built by the students.
The ringmaster meta-bot, for lack of a better name, was probably the most intricate design that I’ve seen, except for some (perhaps deliberately) overengineered FRC robots (cough cough 118 and orbit)
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I might be biased, but IMO ringmaster was the best game in VIQC… there was just enough sheer design space to avoid massive design convergence and the skill ceiling was just so high.
The next few years went pretty quickly, I don’t have that much recollection of it. Here’s a summary of what I do remember:
2019: the hub game. I massively overcomplicated the initial design (huh) and we ended up copying the meta strategy, which was actually a very simple passive EF with an arm with auxilary hooks for storing more hubs.
2020: the cubes and balls game. I massively overcomplicated the initial design (again, huh), and then covid hit…
idk covid happened
2021: the ball shooting game. After experimenting with a bunch of failed designs (flywheel, a few catapults), we copied the meta catapult at the time (its actually genius there’s no way I would come up with it myself). We actually used a reversed indexer mechanism that was probably better than meta indexer, but due to execution issues it never worked as well as I wanted it to. Still got to worlds. The best teams at worlds that year were the ones who executed well, and most used the meta design.
Some things that you should notice:
1) People (like me) like to overcomplicate stuff
2) It appears that simple stuff works best
3) Execution matters. A lot. Especially when your designs get more complicated.
Also, a minor comment on VIQC and VEX: the one-year-long season is a lot of time for design refinement (which is great), but also creates a lot of design convergence as teams start copying the meta.
In any case, I really enjoyed my years in LH Robotics; it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot and gained a lot of experience points. This was also my first exposure to physics, due to Mr. Hadzic. I am forever indebted to him (and I don’t use this lightly) for inspiring my interest in robotics and physics.
Part 2 will describe my high school experiences, and part 3 will look at some key takeaways…
