If you could Breakaway all over again...

[Chris is me]

I'm particularly curious and bored this morning, so here's something that's been on my mind for awhile for a thread.

If you could re-do your 2010 build and competition season over again, how would you do it differently, and why?

There was a lot of potentially missed opportunity this year. Only one team successfully pulled off the redirection strategy. Not a lot of teams had adequate ball control, zone traversion ability, or hanging. What mistakes did you make, and how would you learn from them if 2010 repeated itself? Anything from strategy to build to competition.

My answer below to kick things off.

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Strategy wise, I would have probably pursued prototyping a redirector. A lot of teams are going to say it, but 2791 brought up the idea and quickly dismissed it because we didn't think we could get the balls to reach all the way over to the goals, among other reasons. We had the "midfield oriented" design approach, we knew the center was the most important, we had the high traction... we just missed the opportunity to close the last link in ball acquisition.

In build season, I wish we abandoned hanging and spent all of that time making sure ball control was rock solid. We saw and talked to (?) 1726 and from that we thought ball control would be pretty easy to do with a roller. We obviously thought wrong. I'm tempted to say we should have tried harder to get over the bumps, but it was a main focus for our team throughout build and we were nearly there. We just ran out of time at the end to get over.

In competition, I wouldn't have changed a thing. We drove as we probably should have for both events. We picked great partners both times. Ultimately, we did what we came to do.


Your turn

[Billfred]

Kicker durability. We put a lot of surgical tubing on the kicker to get adequate range, which put a lot of forces on the points where the tubing was attached. Result? Our kicker was cooked by the end of Palmetto. (1398's failed midway through Atlanta.)

Hanging and redirection would've been nice, but the complexity required to let us keep going through the tunnels means I'm not losing any sleep over those calls.

[Jared341]

We would have built somewhere with less snow

(and stuck with one hanger idea long enough to make it work well)

[Peter Matteson]

We would have persued a vertical hanger,
gone with a a non-articulating drive train using 6" wheels instead of the 4" we used,
I would have liked to use a cam based kicker instead of the winch reset system we used.

I don't think our strategy or anything like that would have changed. I also don't think we would have built a redirecting robot. It violates a couple of our standard rules on what can win a game, in addition to the fact you need at least half a field to build and tune that that design.

[dodar]

If we had to change anything, we most likely would use a thinner wall aluminum instead of stock to make our chassis. With the new weight we would have built a vertical hanger arm. I think we would also paint the robot black with some orange, instead of orange with some black.

[ttldomination]

I feel like our drivetrain held us back this year. Not only was the four wheel design absolutely horrible, but the chaining on the drivetrain was extremely unreliable. If we had thought about the 8-WD and implemented that, it would have made our entire game play much more intense.

But anyways we learned from our mistakes (hopefully) and we'll have a robot with a much more reliable DT next year.

[Taylor]

I would have liked for the team to have made decisions faster.

[Josh Drake]

Originally Posted by Taylor

I would have liked for the team to have made decisions faster.

I think a lot of teams struggled with the decisions this year. At the opening scrimmage before the ship date, it seemed evident that teams were not as prepared as they had been in the past.

I think our hind site would have us using the IRI drivetrain from day one, and hanging much faster.

[Brandon Holley]

This was the only year I can remember in my time in FIRST that I don't regret any of our strategy decision. Where we missed was completely in execution. We knew going with a hanging recycling bot was going to be tough, but unique, so we thought we'd roll the dice.

The changes I would make would only pertain to specific design choices (materials, motor selection, etc.)

-Brando

[BrendanB]

Hmm, well even with a decent robot there is always room for improvement so I'll take a shot at it.

Possessor, I wished we could have explored a pincher more. Our dual stage vacuum was really good (it has the power to pick up a trackball), but the ball had to be right where the suction cup was to get a hold on it. We added "active shepherding" which was two belts in front of our robot to pull balls from the side towards the suction cup which worked well but wasn't amazingly effective.

I wish we could have built a vertical hanger and hopefully using gas shocks like teams 67 and 1625. Our original impression was that if we could score just two balls in the time it takes us to hang then a hanger was a waste of weight and build However we didn't always have the time to score two balls in 20 seconds, and as we found on Archimedes, North Carolina, and IRI a hang could have been the difference between moving on or tying as we could score the same as our opponents but 4 bonus points would always give them a win.

Beside that there wouldn't be much I'd change, maybe used a different material instead of 80-20 to avoid the weight and moving of parts.

I would say 2010 was the best year so far for our team with one regional win, one finalist, captain and quarter-finalists on Archimedes and IRI, as well as various awards to go along with it made it a very good year for our team. Even with the changes to our robot we wouldn't have done spectacularly better, I'm satisfied with how far we went!

p.s. Happy Birthday Brandon!

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

p.s. Happy Birthday Brandon!

Thanks!

I was trying to figure out how you knew it was my birthday until I saw the birthday cake next to my name...I somehow have never seen that before in my ~6+ years on CD.

-Brando

[thefro526]

Looking back on the 2010 season, I really wish we would've thought of the design as a whole from day one. There was too much of a disconnect between those designing the machine and those actually building it. In the end it ended up as more of a hodgepodge of ideas than anything.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

Thanks!

I was trying to figure out how you knew it was my birthday until I saw the birthday cake next to my name...I somehow have never seen that before in my ~6+ years on CD.

-Brando

Haha, I have my sources at Northeastern!




jk

[JesseK]

Moving forward, we will simply realize the talent we have and try to reorganize where appropriate. Case study from lessons learned:
With a Mecanum setup, kickers on 2 sides seemed like a great idea...

• A power kicker facing backwards would allow the driver to maintain a 'facing away' orientation when in the far field. The idea here was to keep the driver's natural tendencies natural (i.e. not 'flip' turn directions when facing the wrong way) while far across the field. This theoretically would have allowed us to line up faster. This kicker never made it to full fruition due to a week of snow.
• A medium kicker that allowed us to play midfield or close field. This one was successful.
• The trade-off was to forgo hanging.
• (side note) Karthik probably would not have approved since we were planning to play all 3 zones. Coincidentally with DC being a Week 1 regional in 2010 and a variety of skill-leveled teams in attendance, we wound up having to play all 3 zones. I only mention that because a student mentioned it to me in Atlanta.

With a Mecanum setup, side rollers for the balls on the wall also seemed very viable; coincidentally that would have been unique and allowed us to easily win DC.

• The 5th Gear Simulation revealed that most balls wound up along a wall. Early in competition we found that those that barely missed the goal would roll out directly in front of the goal; if they were not hit just right, usually they'd end up on the side wall.
• The choice was made to handle balls on the wall.
• A side roller that ran the length of the robot side could be strafed up to and run in the direction of the goal.
• The difference was poor execution because our best builders were either on FTC (new to the team) or on Build 2 (parents of new kids) with the field elements, bumpers, and general build supervision.

The strategy and direction was solid; we missed the boat though.

Moving forward, more individual components need to be simulated: especially any complex ones. Naturally-articulated drive seemed like a great idea, but also caused some headache due to its tendency to pop up the front of the robot when accelerating. It wasn't the worst decision or outcome, but I wonder what things would have been like with a rigid pneumatic-wheel drive.

[Dancin103]

I second that! (You silly teams that can build out side in shorts and a t-shirt and not be cold. ).

Originally Posted by Jared341

We would have built somewhere with less snow

(and stuck with one hanger idea long enough to make it work well)