For anyone who can't make it to Karthik's 105-minute "Strategy" presentation in St. Louis on Wednesday, I'll go ahead and give you the first few lines in my notes from the last 2 years' presentations (summarized):
- His name is Karthik and his team wins alot. His teams proactively seeks to help other teams as well.
- When determinining where time and resources are spent, there IS a priority order on every team regardless of whether that priority order is explicitly stated.
- The #1 priority is the thing that MUST work every match to be able to do anything, and that is DRIVE TRAIN.
- The #2 priority is the FIRST thing the game piece touches before it can be scored and that is the game pieces ACQUISITION MECHANISM.
- Robot functions should work 100% and not be some over-constrained half-thought-out almalgamation of metal and motors.
- This implies that if priorities are out of order, then the pickup function may suffer the most due to spatial and weight constraints.
Ergo, if the first thing a team designed on the robot this year was a shooting mechanism then there's a good chance the intake mechanism was a secondary priority. That means there was less brainstorming time and more constraining factors given to that mechanism overall. I know that as Week 1 progressed, this is what wound up happening on my team.