Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
This is pretty straightforward for me.
A competitive robot is one that is virtually always playing in the elims and, moreover, is drafted in the first round in more often than not*.
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If this is your definition of a competitive robot, then more importantly budget your time. Having the time to debug your robot is very key. We ran our robot for about 2 hours before our first regional which was enough time to find out that: our supershifters stopped shifting due to an issue when we assembled them, our arm needed a balance of surgical tubing to lift the tubes, and some code malfunctions. On Thursday at our regional we never had a practice match in which everything worked and we found out more: pnuematics on the deployment were an issue, a piston came loose, more code issues, and another supershifter malfunction. Come friday morning our robot never broke down for the rest of the season including champs, we averaged around 30 points all weekend doing one low logo and a first place minibot, and were the first pick of the 5th seed in a very deep week one regional.
Our robot was extremely basic, we bought a kitbot on steroids from AM (kit chassis, 6wd 6in plactions, and supershifters *no longer sold by AM but it will cost a couple hundred more to buy the components themselves), some 1x1x1/8in aluminum tubing for the base, kit drawer slides and piston for the deployment, and some more tubing and a small piston for the claw driven by two window motors and tada you have our robot.
I don't know what our BOM was however most of the cost was starting costs as a rookie with the metals, cims, controls system, wiring, etc. It is also really hard to budget what a competitive robot is. I can look at a other teams who did worse than us at our regional but had more on their robot in materials, electronics, etc. You can throw as much money as you want at a robot but that won't make it a winner.
Only you know what your team is capable of putting out (ours was about 9 students with a majority freshman). We stuck with what was simple and wound up falling back from the second row to the bottom and we were thrilled with the results. In short: keep it simple, get it done!