[GeeTwo]

3946's robot this year was of an MCC type. For most of our matches, we had 3 CIM motors and no other actuators, and all of the sensory feedback was through the driver. With this, we played in (regional) elims as part of the champion alliance. Our goal was to be selected by presenting some distinctive capabilities that would appeal to a high seeded alliance. The first non-obvious strategic decision was to play the landfill and step. This is why we did not have forks or a body that wraps around the totes - we went for a relatively flat front face that could get right next to a tote even if it were packed in the landfill or atop the step. We had a 4 wheel omni tank drive and a single lift stabilized by dual chains and a relatively flat face that could grab tots and RCs by the lips on the edge, or the RC handle. Our only really innovative solution (that worked) was our "rake" which features 20 10-32x3" steel machine screws which are spring-mounted in a piece of 1.25" c-channel to allow greater flexibility in grabbing game pieces. This rake proved to be as much of a liability as an asset, as we never did learn to make well-nested stacks consistently, limiting us to carrying two or at most three game pieces per trip. We were selected by the #2 alliance at Bayou because of our ability to mine the landfill, including flipping the totes next to the step, and then to remove RCs from the step for scoring. In the canburglar-poor environment of Bayou, it was good enough to be able to get an RC in 60 seconds.

We installed a variety of sensors throughout the build season, but between poor sensor mounts and a mostly-rookie programming team, we never did get any of the sensors working to line up the robot with the RCs and totes well enough to help our scoring ability.

At CMP, we figured that the top alliances would become starved not only of RCs, but of rightside up totes. Our ability to flip totes and to remove them from the step would have been valuable had this been the case, but no alliance was able to score all of the "easy" gray totes and need more.