[pfreivald]

We pretty quickly settled on going under the low bar (someone said above that you can go under or over.... No, you can't.) This makes a device designed to pick up a ball and transport it, with another for scaling the tower, a sufficient design challenge for the time allotted.

What I mean by that is that for our engineering resources, a "do it all" robot that can play the whole game at the highest level is not realistic, and the hardest of those levels is the high goal. Points-wise, eight cycles leaves us in a -24 deficit doing low-to-high comparisons (assuming 100% accuracy and time to make eight cycles), but that swings +10 in our favor by being able to do the always-present low bar.

14 points off our theoretical maximum (call it 19 if we can get an autonomous score either way) in exchange for a drastic simplification of the design process? Yeah, we'll take that trade-off, and the only way we'll live to regret it is if we make it to Champs--at which point we'll happily compete to the best of our ability with our low-goal scoring robot.