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Unread 28-04-2013, 09:05
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Re: How to make your robot withstand the beating

Quote:
Originally Posted by RoeeVulcan View Post
I opened this thread in an attempt to learn from other teams experience, guessing they had a lot to teach me. I would love to know what your team did this year to a assure themselves on a robot that would come out of the field the same way it got in
i understand what you want to do....you want to learn from the experiences of other teams. I think that is great, and this forum is the best place to do that.

But I also know that the best teacher is experience. I know a lot, most of it is learned from making my own mistakes, some of it from watching the mistakes that others have made. I still have so much more to learn, and I know that the only way I can learn it is to try, and keep learning as I make more mistakes, and have a few successes along the way.

At Championships this year we had a sort of major structural failure of our robot. I had anticipated this failure, and had thought of making a brace to prevent it, but never got around to it because the robot was working OK and we had plenty of other things to worry about. The competition here was really tough, and our drive team had to drive the robot really hard just to try to keep up. I also discussed this with several of our students, and they seem to have a good understanding of how important it is to try things, and see what works and what doesn't, and make sure to learn from the failures. Failure is the best teacher.

The trick is to figure out how to learn from from others' failures, or better yet, how to experience failures of your own in a way that do not really hurt, but teach you well. Many of the top teams spend many hours trying different ways to do things, and they test over and over until something breaks or jams or doesn't work right, then they change the design and test some more. It's called 'iterative design'. Having the will to keep working on something over and over is what seems to separate the best from the rest.

Another thing you can do is to post pictures of your design here on Chief Delphi, and ask for constructive criticism. I know that there are many very experienced people here who can probably spot potential problems quickly, if you provide enough detail for them to see what you are planning to build.