[chadr03]

I think what everyone has mentioned is true, but I have not seen anyone really mention the fact that most of the power house teams have been around for many years or least has a mentor that has been. They have seen what works and what doesn’t work for many of the tasks.

We are a small team that is 5 years old and by no means a powerhouse, but we learn a little bit more every year. This year we had a ball harvesting mechanism. This is the second bot we have built with one. Lunacy was the first. On Lunacy the team was starting from scratch trying to come up with conveyor material (something that would give tension but not break, have enough traction to pick up balls, stay centered on the rollers….). While the team had a system that harvested balls it took major design time an iteration getting it to work as it was thought up. When the team made it to our regional they saw that many of the powerhouse teams were using polycord belts (something our team didn’t know existed). Guess what, our harvesting system this year had polycord belts and worked beautifully and we got to spend most of our time working on our shooting system, and bridge lowering mechanism not seeing if shelf liner world work better than leather belts, or if rivets or sewing would hold this fabric belt together.

We still have a long way to go to get to the powerhouse level, but every year we learn and get better. It takes a good strategy, design, and execution to get there. We are still at the level where we have to throw out strategies that we do not have to the resources to built in the given time frame, but hopefully we can attract more mentors, sponsors, and eager students to design to the optimum game strategy in the future.