[thefro526]

This is only the second year since I've been on 816 that we had the Wide vs. Long debate, the first being 2009 where building a long base was almost like handing a victory to a capable opponent that could drive reasonably well.

We ended up assessing a few parameters and came to the conclusion that we could build either a long or wide robot without too much hassle and have them both be about equally competitive. These discussions finally culminated in the decision to build a 'Short Long' of sorts. For all intents and purposes, our foot print is ~32"x27.75" - It's only about a bumper's length longer than a wide robot, which shouldn't cause too many issues with bridge balancing. If all goes well, when it's on the bridge, due to some creative weight positioning, it should effectively be smaller than most wide robots.

I'd imagine that the primary reason that many teams have gone long this year is for ease of traversing the field at speed. Having driven both Long and Wide Bots at ~12-13 fps on flat fields, I can say that a wide bot requires the driver to be much more aware of the robots size than with a long.