Re: Team's Kick off strategies
 

Read the WOT white paper - very useful for dealing with choosing a design/strategy... http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2175

I'd like to expand on Billbo's first 2 points...

Know your team strengths and weaknesses. Play to those strengths!! I'd encourage our team to pick just a couple of new technologies/techniques to add to the robot each year.

Also remember, you don't have to do it all to be competitive. Last year, we saw several robots at each regional that had a great, simple drive system (as Cory emphasized the importance of already!) coupled with an incredible auto mode. I think back how quickly our team could've put together a driving robot and then spend weeks practicing and programming it. We probably would've done a bit better than we did. Instead we spent weeks on a riduculusly large manipulator and did just average. (But it is fun to watch a big robot lift a big ball really high)

Back to Cory's point about the importance of driving. For a bit of reflection, there was a time when it would take teams weeks to get a driving robot together. Hmm, how do we use this drill motor to drive a robot? With the addition of the kit chassis and gearboxes, it is now a rarety to find teams that can't drive. But it doesn't take away from the importance of having a RELIABLE drive system - our drive chain failed at SAC last year in a match and then couldn't get fixed for the next match. Two big losses like that and it really took us out of contention, and moreover, who wants to pick a robot as an alliance partner if they can't RELIABLY drive. The CONSISTENT scoring robots will always make it on a alliance if they aren't choosing one themselves.

I guess I'll throw in another key objective to shoot for... Finish the bot the week before it ships! Use that last week to program tweak and PRACTICE. I know some teams like the ?(fill in your favorite)? can throw together a robot in Week 5 or 6 because they have a fully operational prototype and resources, but the majority of us can't pull that off. So I tell our team they really just have 5 weeks to get this done. We have used this objective since 2005 and our performance at regionals has drastically increased.

So keep those points in mind as your team decides what to tackle this season - what can you do to ensure that it will it be RELIABLE and a CONSISTENT scorer?

Re: Team's Kick off strategies
 

Our kickoff strategy is fairly simple.

- We are a larger team. So we send a smaller remote team to the kickoff.
- Rest of the team meets afterword and watches the video.
- The remote team does inventory of the kit.
- Once we all have seen the game, we talk about how to play the game.
- Talk about how to optimize the score.
- Talk about realistic rates of scoring (which we ALWAYS underestimate, except for stack attack.)

At no point do we talk about robot DESIGNS on the first day. It's all game on day one.