A lot of great stuff in this thread! A few things to add/repeat:
- Effective scouting and good strategy can make a significant difference in the performance of your robot/team throughout an event. In eliminations, getting the right 3rd robot and carefully understanding the strengths and weaknesses of all 6 robots on the field can make a tremendous difference.
- Don't focus all your energy into one subsystem to the exclusion of other dependent subsystems. Yes, drivetrain comes first, but don't focus all your time on the shooter (or arm/elevator) only to learn that you can't score game pieces you don't have because you failed to design an efficient and reliable acquisition system!
- Do your best to thoroughly understand the game in the first few days... and keep up with the subtle game changes/evolutions throughout the season! Designing and building the pinnacle of technical achievement won't help you on Saturday afternoon if your robot doesn't play the right game. Also, understand that Week 1 and Championships may be two dramatically different games.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chadfrom308
-Floor pick up is not that important. The good teams in the 2011 season and 2013 season never picked up from the floor
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I disagree with all of the above... I would agree that floor pickup should never be a forgone conclusion (and maybe that's what you meant, but not what came out). A lot of successful teams didn't use floor pickup in 2013.. and didn't have any reason to change that. A few teams were successful without floor pickup in 2011... and more teams definitely could have, but most teams over-estimated its value. But in both years there were highly successful teams that relied on floor pickup to implement their strategy.
You need only look as far back as 2012 to see a game in which floor pickup was nearly critical to being successful.