[JesseK]

We attended a "Week 0" event, hosted by Chantilly Robotics (612). Many thanks to them for finding a space and building the field! We learned a mountain's worth of information about our own robot. The event wasn't crowded, so we were able to stay on the field for pretty much as long as we wanted. We got about 3 hours of drive time. We already nailed a quick 1-ball autonomous, so today was all teleop.

- There was a noticeable drop in the amount of time it took to rectify errors between the start and end of the drive time. In other words, through the drills and raw trial/error, the drivers became MUCH better at chasing down a ball. I think it will be painfully obvious if a team's drivers haven't had practice if competing against those who have.
- It was best to simply load right next to the human player. We tried a variety of inbounding techniques including rolling, tossing, etc. The lower the kinetic energy required to complete the inbound, the faster that ball went sailing over the truss.
- Flat trajectories with plenty of power are KING of the high goal. There's such a large margin of error I think we missed 3 shots all day - and one of those was while trying something completely experimental.
- We are forever hooked on Colson Performa wheels. 3 hours of driving, very little wear and 0 maintenance.
- The best catches across all of FRC will come from TRUSS specialists who apply the minimum amount of kinetic energy to a TRUSS shot. In fact, I bet almost anyone can catch with some practice and that type of bot.
- With the last bullet in mind, I think it's better to just not plan to catch unless a robot has specifically built something specifically to catch and can absorb the energy of an average TRUSS bot's ball. A single bad catch could cost an entire cycle's worth of time depending on where the ball wound up going.
- Inbound-TRUSS vs Inbound-Assist-TRUSS - who knows. Still on the fence about that one
- Low kinetic energy pass-assists will do very well. I wish we could have practiced more of them today.
- Getting a ball off of the edge of the field without incurring penalties will take a lot of practice; it is the biggest advantage we gained today. We ran drills of doing just that all up and down the field so our driver could gauge various distances and angles. We figured out that it takes an extra second or two to do it right with our robot, but the penalty for getting it wrong is equivalent to giving the opponents 20 extra seconds of free time. The biggest danger to teams will be driving right next to the wall chasing down a ball - just a corner of the intake clipping the edge while adjusting to the ball will incur a penalty.
- Pushing the ball into the low goal is easy, but getting the ball there in a controlled manner to do so isn't. It's much better to contain the ball and then go into the low goal over the top. Not that we'll do too much low goal.
- Assists without ingesting a ball are a bit harder than I thought. We'll see how it goes when more teams are trying.
- This one is more of an eliminations-type bullet. This game will take a LOT of higher-level coaching - i.e. coaches who micro-manage will hurt their alliance due to lack of field vision. As a result, drivers need to be able to think on their own until re-directed. Drivers need to be able to communicate with themselves. The coach needs to learn their specific lexicon (i.e. 'kick' is not the same thing as 'intake' even though it's the same movement) so communication of the higher-level strategy can be done in terms they immediately understand. Field vision, to understand what allies and opponents are up to, is key.
- The ball didn't go out of the field but once or twice (during catches) and then it wasn't where our own HP's could have had an effect. As a result I don't know how much we will want our human player outside of the inbounding zone - three HP's running a ball out to the cycle is much better than one depending on the match tradeoffs.