|
Re: Poll: Reasonable and achievable, or shooting for the stars?
Knowing what is reasonable and achievable for your team or organization, and planning a great design and strategy around it, is essential to the engineering process. It would be my opinion that if members of FRC teams do not consider in their design process past experiences and educated guesses, they are not learning real-world engineering.
The way to shoot for the stars is not to dive into the depths of uncertainty, or even worse, go forward with a plan that you know has a high chance of failure. The real way is to gather up resources and knowledge and experience to the point that you are actually comfortable about tackling that next challenge. For now, the way to inspire your team to grab that next rung in the ladder is to do what you can with what you've got.
Play to your strengths. Go for awards. Have your driver learn defense. Make a simple mechanism that possibly doesn't work as well as a complex one but is much easier to repair and make replacements for. Compared to other competitions, FRC makes it relatively easy to do well with limited resources. Why not make the most of this fact?
I have too many FRC anectotes about this topic to possibly talk about in a post like this. However:
Consider 3322 in 2013. We decided to climb the pyramid, and based our entire robot dimensions on our design for a climber. This resulted in sacrifices for disc loading and shooting. The result was that we didn't get a climber on the robot and we experienced disc jams the whole season because our dimensions disallowed us from designing the shooter we wanted to design. Next, consider 2930 in 2015. We had a modified kit frame with a simple elevator and simple pneumatic grabber, and a PVC can grabber for PNW. This was by far the simplest robot design by a team I've been on. The result? We seeded 5th, 8th, and then 2nd at our district events and won the Pacific Northwest Championship. Looking back, we have learned from our past seasons and we are a stronger team that can afford to try more things, as long as we don't neglect our priorities.
By building a simple, reasonable robot, you are not "giving up". Knowing your limits proves you are not weak, but strong.
__________________
John Bottenberg - University of Michigan '14 - Microsoft
FLL Team "Dark Matter": 2003-2005
Robofest Team "Dark Matter": 2005-2008
Team 67 Programmer: 2007-2010
Team 3322 Programming Mentor: 2012-2014
Team 2930 Engineering Mentor: 2015-????
|