[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by IKE

This survey fostered the idea as I was surprised that a couple of really good teams actually stopped build practice bots because they typically had access to 3 districts (and 3 x 6 hrs. un-bag) plus a district championship to gain experience. I am not sure that they were top 1% teams, but they were within that top 4%. 6 hrs. of unbag split into 3 x 2 hr. sessions is a decent amount of access for practice, test, and tune. I know a lot of really great teams spend way more than that, but it truly is a nice chunk of time for a team. If teams had similar chunks each week, they could do some pretty impressive stuff.

I remember answering your survey questions about this- and we are one of those teams you are describing who stopped building full scale practice robots. The past few years we've been playing 4 times before DCMP, and then getting DCMP before heading to CMP. It was actually becoming more work to maintain the practice bot as we swapped 'end effectors' and subsystems back and forth.

We will usually have several 'test bucks' for software or specific mechanism design, but a vast majority of our practice is done on the competition robot before ship, during unbag windows and through practice matches at competitions. We really emphasize being ready to go out of the bag so we can cycle the practice field many times and tune and tweak.

Would I prefer to have a practice bot? Yes definitely. However, it does take a considerable amount of effort for our team as we do all of our own fabrication. It's been working for us thus far, and we're continuing to refine our process!

-Brando