[Aidan S.]

First things first for this team, they should pursue the simplest, most effective, and easiest to build drive train possible, and build a kitbot on steroids. Any team can toss together a kitbot on steroids, and this is a very solid drive for any team with mid-pack to lower fabrication resources. Also, with a single speed drive that is geared fast enough (say around 10 fps), they would be quick enough to effectively play the game without the added complexity of shifting gearboxes.

If you wanted a robot to seed high in Logomotion, tube hanging becomes more of a necessity. The least complicated tube haning mechanism should be sought after to achieve this task. A simple rear-mounted single jointed arm could be realitively easy for this team to build and design, but I think they should make one sacrifice with the arm: don't have a floor pick-up ability, get your tubes exclusively from the feeder slot. This would allow the arm to be able to score on the high racks without any kind of extending mechanism or second joint.

Team 1503's 2011 robot is definately compelling proof that choosing not to pick up off the floor can produce one of the strongest robots in all of FIRST. Their two regional wins and trip to einstein speak volumes for the effectiveness of this machine.

So this concept robot, with its simple single jointed arm could hypothetically score one ubertube and five to six tubes on the high rack per match. Even without a minibot, this would win a majority of matches at the regional level and even allow this robot to seed high enough to be an alliance captain (but I bet that with scoring rate of 5 to 6 tubes per match, they would probably be a first pick to one of the top four alliance captains, even without a minibot). Now if this team can come up with some kind of simple minibot and deployment system, this team could win regionals and be picked at the championship.