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Re: How many times is enough to prove consistency?
If a team+robot accomplishes something every time they attempt that thing between Wednesday and Sunday, I would say that they were consistently able to accomplish it.
On a slightly more serious note, one big aspect of achieving consistency when doing anything is controlling the independent variables that affect doing that thing.
If you call the thing-to-be-done a process, that process will consume (or be affected by) inputs that are fed into it purposefully (such as battery charge remaining, driver commands, etc.) and by inputs that come from the environment around it (temperature, other robots, debris, friction, etc).
If you want to think about whether other teams' FRC robots can accomplish some process consistently, your thinking needs to include thinking about all the inputs that affect the process, and about how many of those inputs the other team-plus-robot are able to control (how many are possible to control, and how many do they control); and think a little about which of those inputs are the most important.
If the team-plus-robot that you are assessing is doing well at controlling the important variables that can be controlled, then they are likely to perform consistently (predictably) during matches. They (and their allies) will be able to *predict* outcomes as well as can be reasonably expected.
And, I think that being able to make accurate *predictions* is the real topic being discussed here.
With that in mind, seeing another team-plus-robot accomplish some process once could easily convince me that I can rely on their predictions of how well they will perform that process in the future; so long as that one observation was complemented with me knowing that they are controlling the important independent variables that affect the process.
I hope this helps.
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Blake Ross, For emailing me, in the verizon.net domain, I am blake
VRC Team Mentor, FTC volunteer, 5th Gear Developer, Husband, Father, Triangle Fraternity Alumnus (ky 76), U Ky BSEE, Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Kentucky Colonel
Words/phrases I avoid: basis, mitigate, leveraging, transitioning, impact (instead of affect/effect), facilitate, programmatic, problematic, issue (instead of problem), latency (instead of delay), dependency (instead of prerequisite), connectivity, usage & utilize (instead of use), downed, functionality, functional, power on, descore, alumni (instead of alumnus/alumna), the enterprise, methodology, nomenclature, form factor (instead of size or shape), competency, modality, provided(with), provision(ing), irregardless/irrespective, signage, colorized, pulsating, ideate
Last edited by gblake : 27-01-2016 at 14:29.
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