Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto
I think 610 is known for not building a practice robot? Was this the case when they won in 2013?
Given that 32 teams make Einstein now, I'd guess there are at least a few, if not more, that have made it to the big show with no practice robot.
-Mike
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Ya, we generally don't build a practice bot (as was the case in 2013), mainly due to the effort in manually machining two full robots. Needless to say, not having a practice bot has been annoying at times, but it certainly doesn't stop us from iterating and improving.
I will say that having a practice bot is really nice for testing and flushing out designs to see the weaknesses. We had to rush finishing our bot in 4 weeks so we could had the remaining 2 as practice/time to break the bot and improve designs.
We did make 2 bots in 2010 and just ran into a bunch of issues. Whenever we were making new autos, we found that whatever we did on the practice bot always required a lot of work to get working on the real bot (probably due our feedback integration). Additionally, we make lots of changes here and there on our real bot and it's really annoying to do that twice to truly have an identical replica. We still found the biggest issue was actually making two bots. It took us a week and a half to fully machine out bot this year, it's just unreasonable for us to spend a solid 3 or so weeks machining parts...
This year, we designed the backbone (the superstructure of the robot and the claw) of our robot to be easily removed (and lucky it was under 30lbs
). This lets us do maintenance and upgrades of our bot without having to make a practice bot. If you look at our robot between GTRC and ONWA, we managed to get our high goal shooting nailed down (pretty huge change in performance) by working on the real claw for our bot. Kind of a nice balance between making a practice bot and not.
Tldr: We don't build a practice bot because it takes too long to machine for a replica that never is truly accurate to the real thing. Instead, we built our bot to be modular so we can iterate on certain parts within the withholding allowance.