Well, I can't entirely explain the title...yet. I'm waiting for the white papers to come back up to post my "paper" (book
) on the robot design process. Basically, it's the design process we're (my team) using this year. And I made it.
It's a bit different view on "strategy" as you know it. In a nutshell, it employs my rule that "
You're building a machine to play the game, not a strategy"
To some of you, that might not make sense. One basic example is right in front of you : Your hand. Your hand was not designed specifically for stacking 20 bins, right? But your brain can control it to do so. That's the basis of my strategic approach. The strategy must come from the user end, not the hardware. So, when designing your robot, you're trying to decide which functions are useful for your robot to have at it's disposal. These are decided through some Plays, Detective work, and finally filtration. Also, when you finally have your functions, you might instantly have your design! or, you might even have half of it done before you begin designing. This is done through our Pre-Season design methods, which also value the strength of good designs over unused ones. There's a very different approach in this design strategy, though. I outline many "Illusions" that FIRST has set up in the flow of the competition to "deter" you from building a sucessful robot (This is just my POV)
There's also a few constant functions of a good robot in there, etc.
Anyway, I'm hoping to get the paper up when the time comes. With the aid of this method, we plan to have our robot designed the day of kickoff. Though...we don't want to rush things. Oh, you'll just have to read the paper.
Oh, and there's a little extra blip at the end on drive team strategy. When I came up with these methods I lauged my pants off at some of the teams (ours included
) that spent hours "strategizing".
Anyway, I'll post a link to the paper once it's up.
(PS: please excuse my spelling! I don't have the time to edit the post, I gotta run!)