Quote:
Originally Posted by Lij2015
After matches if your drive team tells you something broke, and you didn't really know because your robot was still doing "fine", you have the correct drive team.
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This is a great thread, and I'm going to save it as a resource to look back on next season. Lots of great tips, and as I look back, lots of lessons learned that I can identify with.
We ran late with our build and had to bag an incomplete robot. We also had to drastically simplify the design that we had originally planned due to lack of time. At our first regional, we spent the entire first day finishing it, and we missed all of our scheduled practice matches. Then we had qualification matches the following day with NO driver practice. The results were predictable. We ranked very low, and we experienced the exact opposite of the quoted post -- from the stands, we kept asking "what is he doing? why is he ___? why doesn't he ___?" and we didn't realize that the reason for the erratic driving was because a mechanism had failed.
Luckily we had a second regional and then got chosen from the wait list to go to CMP, two experiences which helped get our rears into gear. We fixed a lot of our problems -- and actually had driver practice! -- in time for the second regional, and that helped us double our average match score. That boosted everyone's confidence, but we still noticed multiple failures of our tote-holding mechanism. Learning we were going to championships was one more motivator to fix that problem for good and have even more drive practice.
At champs, it was like we were a whole other robot. Because we were! We had evolved from a landfill robot that couldn't do cans to a feeder station robot that could. Once our driver got to know the robot he could do much more skilled things with it. At one of our matches on Curie our tote-holder failed again, meaning we couldn't stack, but he quickly made the best of it and started scoring totes by pushing them onto the platform one at a time. We almost didn't notice
So, to reiterate other points -- driver practice is huge.