[mathking]

One thing I liked about 2006 was that fairly simple, well driven robots could compete very well. At Buckeye that year the Martians (494) and the Tiger Techs (963) had the two best performing robots through qualifying. The Martians had an amazing shooter with automatic goal tracking, able to get all or almost all the balls in to the high goal in autonomous even while being pushed and able to shoot from almost anywhere on their half of the field, with a good ball gathering system and funky spiral system to lift balls to the shooter. The Tiger Techs could only score in the low goal, had a good low scoring autonomous that just ran straight along the wall and dumped balls, a good good ball gatherer with a huge basket and a two speed transmission. The Tiger Techs also had a really good driver. They qualified first in spite of not being able to score high and having a couple of rounds in which they played down an ally. The Tiger Techs robot is something we could have built in two or three weeks (if we had been smart enough to conceive of the strategy) while the Martians robot was probably beyond our capabilities at the time.