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Originally Posted by Ginger Power
Does it just come down the number of iterations of a design? The more tweaking, and fine tuning, the more consistency... What is the best way to go about this fine tuning?
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The iteration of the design must be driven by concrete measurements to be of real benefit. In mass manufacturing, the concept of DMAIC is used for statistical process control. It means that changes are made and the effects of those changes measured, recorded and compared with the results of other experiments. An integral part of this is keeping an Engineering Notebook. I have heard the following many times "we tried a bunch of different settings for X and it worked great at one of them but we don't remember what that setting was and we can't get it back".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC
From my past experience in robotics and my day job designing industrial electronics, one has to be willing to go through at least 3-4 iterations to get a robot that performs consistently in competition or a design good enough to ship to a customer. This means you have to commit, up front, to having enough time in your schedule and have enough resources and materials to actually do those iterations. Prior experience applied to better planning and design work up front can reduce the number of iterations that you will actually need. You can then use that time for further design improvements or practice.
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Originally Posted by Ginger Power
Is it possible to make an inferior mechanical design superior with enough programming loops?
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Yes, if you mean iterating an inferior mechanical design to make it a good one. It may take a lot of work. It would be best to study the state of the art, do better planning and up-front design (including some calculations for some STEM content) so that you have a better initial design. Aim to throw out the inferior designs in the time between brainstorming and committing to a final design. Once one has committed to a design, it becomes increasing difficult to make improvements (see Figure 1 in the link below).
http://enfinio.com/new-product-development/
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ginger Power
During your game analysis/initial design brainstorming, how does consistency factor vs. other design elements?
My team has lacked consistency in scoring game elements in every year of its existence. We've managed to do pretty well in spite of that through strategic creativity, but it's definitely time to take the next step as a program. How do you achieve the consistency needed to be the number 1 alliance captain or first pick at an event?
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Consistency of performance should be one of the top priorities throughout your design process, especially when brainstorming and doing the detail design work.
At the 2015 Championship I visited the teams that were doing well in our division, Tesla, and the division with pits across the aisle, Archimedes. I asked them what made their teams successful. Later, I took a group of our team members and visited those teams again and asked them to repeat what they had told me (thank you 234, 1538, 2481 and 2122). The common thread was best expressed by one of the mentors for the Roboteers, "obsessive control of the game piece". Look where it got them
I chose these teams because I felt that our team members could relate to what they were doing and feel that they could emulating them. I specifically avoided taking our team members to visit teams such as 254, 1114, 67, 16 since our students were likely to view them as "Gods who can do anything".