[JesseK]

Our story this year echos a lot of what's been said in this thread. I don't know if there's a good football analogy for it though.

In between our last event and champs, we doubled down on our niche of can manipulation. We also tuned our Canburglars so they worked on-field rather than just in practice. They weren't the fastest in the world, but were definitely as fast as we could envision at the time given our robot's setup (not having seen 254's bolt-ons, that is). This played well with our claw that could up-right a can, as well as mods to ultra-grip the Can as we sped around the field to noodle it and set it exactly where it was needed. The decision was to only focus on those two things, ignoring all totes. It required re-framing our strategies to what a partner needed, rather than how we provided the most value carte-blanche. If we got an alliance which couldn't do totes - our job was to still ignore totes because we were a can specialist (though we could do a single coop tote with the claw).

We didn't even re-assemble our tote stacker at champs. For 4.5 weeks of effort, that was one of the toughest decisions our team has ever made. The strategy was simple: get 2 cans in autonomous, noodle them, place them, and stay out of the way unless something else was discussed.

As a mid-pack robot, it was easily the best decision we could have made going into a high-profile event. At the end of Friday, we had a good feeling that we were among the best in the division in something that the all-star robots could do, but would prefer to not have to waste the time on themselves. We also felt good about being one of the very few division robots which could reliably get both cans from the step each match all throughout the 2nd day (missing 1 can in 5 matches Friday, iirc). Slow (600ms touch, 2 seconds off the step) comparatively, but still effective.

The good indicators: we were repeatedly scouted by 3 of the top 8 teams towards the end of Friday, two of them with very specific questions.

This isn't the vision we had starting out on Day 0, kickoff day. For some on our team Wednesday at champs was a real struggle of anxiety. This type of thing isn't easy to envision, think through or execute. It requires new mechanisms, ways to field test them and a lot of preparation going into the event. Yet it's 100% completely worth it when it changes the champs experience for the team.