Hello, good afternoon.
Our team is unsure about the date for submitting the poster and the TDP, and whether any further documents about the robot will be needed. We would like more information as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Lucas Luna and Leonardo Blanco
Aperture Robotics team members.
Hi Lucas and Leonardo,
we haven’t decided the date yet. I have put a note on the agenda and we will let you know here and/or in a next newsletter.
Best Regards
David
Hi Lucas & Leonardo,
To answer your questions about what documentation is needed, please first go through the award guidelines and rubrics we’ve published here.
We intentionally did not use the term “TDP” and were more general with requiring “design documentation”. In soccer, there are not currently any requirements on how to format or structure your documentation unlike what you might find with TDPs. I also wanted to emphasize that documentation is a process and not a product like a TDP. For instance, I’m expecting to see artifacts from early in your design process - sketches, videos of designs failing, the data you collected, notes on a white board, etc. The documentation should be more about how your designed developed rather than what you developed.
Your posters are more about what you developed. So a team quickly looking at your poster may find something of interest to them and seek your design document to find out how it was accomplished.
Finally, you may prepare a presentation for the group interview. Here, you are to focus on what information you can discuss with other teams that may be of benefit to them. A great example last season is a team that presented their economical solution to a mirror after a new team discussed struggles they had developing their own. What was great about this is that the team that had the great solution didn’t know it was great until the other team had discussed their issues; they didn’t mention their solution in their initial presentation probably because they thought that such a simple approach would be insignificant or perhaps embarrassing. You probably want to keep any prepared presentation for the group interview brief, make sure everyone contributes (if there are challenges with English, it is better to be more scripted than to be silent but we do accommodate for that), and be prepared to demonstrate what you’ve done by using one of your robots, pulling up schematics, programs, CAD files, etc.
Thank you for your questions. Please feel free to post any more questions here.
Mike