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Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
I think one aspect we wish we could change is our ability to spit the ball back out onto the floor for a mouth to mouth pass. Once the ball is fully in our shooter it needs to be shot out of which we can do a full powered shot, soft shot, and a nice 1 point dump into the hopper of another robot. There were many times where we planned for the mouth to mouth and partially sucked the ball onto our bumper but once it was fully in the ring it was coming out through a pickup.
There are a few instances where it would have helped our strategy but what it mainly hurt was how teams ranked our robot which I felt contributed to us falling so low in the pickings in our division. We ended up working with three amazing robots and even if we didn't make it as far as Einstein I wouldn't have traded the experience we got from working with Nemesis, Torque, and Winnovation but we know the fact we couldn't spit it out once it was inbounded caused a lot of teams to second guess our robot being on their alliance.
This wasn't just a championship thing we noticed it all season when partners gave us a funny look that we couldn't spit out of our shooter. While designing we had prototyped our pickup that it could grab the ball and pull it out or use the back pickup to help push it to the front roller but once the final robot was assembled the ring had a different geometry than was prototyped.
Just like last year even though our robot was crazy and we may have missed some key concepts in the game like ground pickup was better than 20 extra climb points in 2013 or quick low passes coupled with some nice long catapult shots is better than accurately being able to throw the ball to your partners or yourself. In the end I still support our 2013 and 2014 robot designs as they keep pushing our team to do crazier things (that work!), set us apart from your everyday robots, and have their own elegance coupled with simplicity.
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