game designer with a robot design in mind?

[RvRDilemma]

With each challenge, I find myself asking my team if they think that the robot game designer had a specific design in mind when she/he developed the game? Any thoughts?

My team has always used this question to experiment with different design concepts. It has always made them think of the field as a whole...and not just a collection of missions.

At the end of some seasons, I find one or two team [on youtube] have found that design [by its design being only applicable to that year's challenge]. But that design doesn't always win the robot game...as some who have expected.

[dcsastry]

I'm not sure - you should ask Scott Evans, the FLL Engineer who designed the models for this year: fllrobotgame@usfirst.org

[RvRDilemma]

dcsastry,

I could ask him, but I would want other people's opinion first. The real answer really doesn't matter. The design might decide not to tell us, even if he does or doesn't have a design in mind. He surely won't tell us what that design is until everything is said and done.

[Gary Voshol]

I'm not sure if game designers have an exact robot design in mind, but I know they're always surprised by the wide variety of robots that the teams create. Sometimes a design is so unexpected that the game rules have to be changed (FRC) or clarified via Updates (FLL) to accommodate the design - or to outlaw it!

[Linda Zoe]

I would hope that the challenge designers plan that a robot that could solve all the missions could be built from just the parts included in the base kit plus extra parts kit that can be ordered when registering a team. This would ensure that all teams have equal opportunity. This would be similar to the stipulation that only certain programming software can be used in order to not penalize teams that cannot afford to buy the latest and greatest, most powerful programming language software.

Linda
Team 143, BEAR-B-Q

[timdavid]

No, I don't think the robot game designer has a specific robot design in mind when he designs the mission field. I think he has ideas on how a team might approach the challenge, and he can think of techniques that teams might use to navigate the field and solve particular missions, but I don't believe he has a preconceived notion of what the perfect robot design is for a specific challenge.

I don't really believe in the concept of a single "perfect" design solution for a specific problem. In any design, a team must make tradeoffs and their design is subject to different constraints. A team can be constrained by the Lego parts they have available. A team might need to choose between solving a mission quickly or doing it in a slower but more reliable way. Successful teams create good designs in spite of those constraints, and can justify the design tradeoffs they make.

Also, sometimes teams create designs not because they are the optimal approach in terms of speed or reliability, but simply because the approaches are more novel or fun. Last season, our team used both a mechanical technique to wall-follow, and a technique using the ultrasonic sensor. Frankly, the mechanical approach was probably faster and just as reliable, but the ultrasonic sensor approach was more fun to develop and to watch.

Last year, at the World Festival, there were 6 teams that achieved a perfect 400 score. And I'm sure there were many other teams that hit 400 but did not make it to the World Festival. Did all those teams have the same robot design? Did they all use the same attachments, and attack the field the same way? No, they all came up a variety of designs. That's part of the fun of FLL - seeing different ways teams can solve common problems.

[BlueCheesyFlamingos]

Great question! I have always wondered this too but never had the guts to ask Scott.

Personally I don't think there is any one design in mind. I think he designs with the NXTs strengths and weaknesses in mind only. There are always a mixture of easy, average and hard difficulty missions. That way there is a challenge for new and old teams a like.

[Dean Hystad]

Originally Posted by BlueCheesyFlamingos

Great question! I have always wondered this too but never had the guts to ask Scott.

Personally I don't think there is any one design in mind. I think he designs with the NXTs strengths and weaknesses in mind only. There are always a mixture of easy, average and hard difficulty missions. That way there is a challenge for new and old teams a like.

Scott is not smart enough to design the optimum robot for a challenge. He'd be competing against thousands of teams and tens of thousands of clever minds. Based on his designs he is a pretty sharp guy, but that is really asking too much of him.

As for robot designs, each year I solved the game using Tribot. Certainly not an optimal design, but it can lift and push and that takes care of nearly all FLL challenges. My girls used pretty much the same design each year. Rear drive, wall following wheels, front attachment motor, lots of static attachment points in the front and sides. One or two light sensors near the front. A bumper with touch sensor in the front or rear. Each year it got a little smaller, but I bet their biggest and smallest robots were within a half inch width and an inch length of each other.

The big change year to year were attachments and programming. But even attachments didn't change a whole lot. There was always an assortment of self aligning jigs, usually some sort of spear or trident, and the handy corral that was used every year they competed.

[RvRDilemma]

In my mind, I think that a low built-in tray might have been something the game "founder" might have considered. The problem is that it has to be low for the dispensers to drop into, which are scatter around the field.

I've seen some teams, including mine, consider this design feature. They problem is, where should the NXT brick be mounted? Where should the drive motors be placed?

Last year, it was about having a design that could place the bone-bridge, pick the ball with the leg and, and then face sideways to destroy ball cells. Although there were many designs, all of them that achieve 400 points had this feature. Atleast the ones I saw on youtube.

[someonewhobikes]

Originally Posted by Linda Zoe

I would hope that the challenge designers plan that a robot that could solve all the missions could be built from just the parts included in the base kit plus extra parts kit that can be ordered when registering a team.

One of my teams last year built their robot with just the parts from the basic Education Mindstorms kit; at the time we didn't have the money to buy the resource kit. Certainly you could do other things with more parts, but there's no *requirement* for more parts to build a successful robot.

They got the highest score among our three teams, btw.