Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Ore
I'm thinking the root cause of the problem is more related to the rate of evolution of minibot designs. With the full-size competition robots, even when teams see robots with really amazing features, they are just too complicated to copy in the time available. The design time of one iteration of a minibot is fairly short and teams which so choose can keep iterating as long as they want. My guess would be that the GDC envisioned 4 or 5 second minibot times and the triggering system on the tower would have been fine. Early in the build season, talk of 3 second minibots surfaced. Then 1625 posted their video and the times fell to 2 seconds and now times near 1 second have been demonstrated. Put 2000 teams on a problem and allow them to iterate over and over again and give them a big payoff or iterating over and over and the result is that by St. Louis any team that wants an awesomely fast minibot will have one and maybe they all will exceed what the GDC envisioned.
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Within a few hours of the update clarifying we had to use FTC motors, we had already calculated (with darn simple math), that sub 1 second minibots were possible. This should not have been overlooked, that's as if they made a field border that could only handle impacts of robots going 7 ft/s, because they assumed none would go faster.