[Donut]

When I was a student on 498 we made heavy use of sensors, but that was largely because I was head of the programming team and kept wanting to learn new things each year. Sensors can definitely help make a good robot better and there is a nice shiny award for using them well, but I would put them as the last focus because they will usually not make up for mechanical deficiencies (the only personal exception was we used a gyro to drive straight which prevented our drivetrain in 2007 from drifting to one side). Our robots were living proof of it, in 2006 and 2007 we had multiple autonomous mode options and in match automation of our shooter targeting (2006) and arm positions (2007). None of it mattered because our game piece manipulators were poor in both years and we tended to lose control of game pieces long before we could score them. I guess it did matter some, as our ability to score in autonomous was probably the only reason we made eliminations in 2006, but we were more or less useless 20 seconds in to most matches due to ball jams.

If you have a little extra programming resources, push for one new sensor each year. Maybe use a potentiometer on an arm next year, the following try to add a gyro, etc.

Something I think teams tend to forget about when they go ahead with more sensor control is what will happen if the sensor fails. Starting in 2006 we always built in a Manual Override switch that would allow us to disable all sensor control when flipped. It saved us once or twice when a potentiometer slipped or a limit switch got jammed and we were able to get out of the software lock on our arm by overriding sensor feedback.