[GreyingJay]

I think this year what it all boiled down to was consistency. If you built a robot that could do something (like stack totes) and do it every time, you did well. As a byproduct you were also very predictable, which made it easier to be an alliance pick.

Like Karthik said in his presentation, initially it looked like this game would be perfect for specializations - landfill stackers, feeder stackers, and cappers. However it seems that in the end, the robots that did the best were those that didn't rely on other alliance members for help. I think this is because in the end most robots were not super consistent. A stacking robot that relied on the performance of another capping robot to succeed (and vice versa) would drop in the rankings as soon as one or the other robot made a mistake, but an all-in-one robot that could hold its own ground, kept going. Some specialists did make it through. The ones that succeeded were those that consistently, time after time, did what they were designed to do.

Initially we designed our robot to be a fast landfill stacker. That did not work as well as we'd hoped (mostly because we ran out of build time). By the end of the season we had evolved into an all-in-one that could do coopertition and then make our own 4-tote capped stacks. 40-80 points per round. Nowhere near the best robots, but we were finally consistent.

Had we gone into our week 3 regional with what we had at worlds, we would have done much better. Of course any and every robot improved over time. Which again says to me that winning is about being consistent. Part of that is engineering away your mechanical failures and flakiness, and part of that is confidence and practice on the drive team.

Also, part of our day 1 strategy was to be good at coopertition. This is the one thing we did well every time (notwithstanding elevator/clip failures), because it was an easy 40 points. This was perhaps short sighted given that after qualifications were done we had little to offer to alliances.