[archiver]

Posted by Dodd Stacy at 12/28/2000 9:49 AM EST


Engineer on team #95, Lebanon Robotics Team, from Lebanon High School and CRREL/CREARE.


In Reply to: Re: Speed vs. Torque?
Posted by Raul on 12/28/2000 8:33 AM EST:




: Our team has always chosen to not specialize in one or two areas. We prefer to have a flexible design that can do many things. Our philosophy is that if you do only one or two things really well and cannot do much else, then it is easier to find a strategy to beat you. However, it is not easy but possible to find a robot concept/architecture that does a couple of things really well and yet do many things.

: Unfortunately, some inexperienced teams will rush to decide on a concept so they can start building their robot right away. They start looking at the details without understanding the weakness of their overall concept. My advice, especially to rookie teams, is to not be intimidated by the short time you have (6 weeks); make sure you really analyze the implications of the strengths and weakness in the overall concept you choose.

Good advice from Raul. We try to spend the first full week of the 6 just settling on our play strategy, what capabilities the bot-to-be needs in order to execute that strategy, and what general mechanism concepts we will use to give the bot those capabilities.

As a very important part of the play strategy decision, we always have part of the team working on how to defeat our candidate strategies. We literally crawl around on the floor (trying to mimic robot speed/torque range) with dummy goals, balls, etc and try to work out how much strategic flexibility is needed to play a robust game.

A one-trick robot can do some pretty entertaining stunts, like tipping the puck to tumble off two opponents (;D), but it's not a way to win a competition.

Dodd