Re: Strategy - Your method??
 

Last year we also tried to build a stacker, but it was modular, (If that is the word). We had a choice of having it on or not. We never ended up using it because it was two heavy and our drive system was to weak for it. Even though it didn't work, it was all a good experiencce just the same. I wish i could say that our team will be more realistic about what we can and can't do when we design our bot this year, but, everyone likes to dream. Its achieveing those dreams that is the hard part.

Re: Strategy - Your method??
 

We like to control our own destiny, and build a robot that allows us to do that. Basically, we look at the game and decide what would make the biggest difference in match points in our favor. Let's look at last year's game... there were basically four pivital things to accomplish that would drastically move points arround the board. 1) Be the first 'bot to the wall, 2) have an extreme ability to move bins arround the field, 3) stacking bins in your own zone, and 4) hill superiority. Looking at all four options, which would most greatly shift the points arround? There are great arguments from all sides, so I won't even begin to fight for either strategy. Through a group discussion, we descided that for our robot to look attractive for the elimination round and to still be competitive during the qualification rounds, we should be fast to the bins and focus on stacking. Not once did we think about how we were going to accomplish something. During strategising, we only focused on what we were going to do. We followed an engineering rubric that DuPont uses called QFD. Let me see if I can pull up some of our documentation on that for you... I'll post it up later if I can find anything.