[kirtar]

A couple comments I have (covering some of the various topics in this thread). In terms of scouting personnel, I plan on working with (an)other team(s) (1747 and 1646 if they agree to) so that I can have 1 person looking at each robot and one person looking at each human player. Otherwise, I'll probably say just jot a comment on how the human player did.

As for human players scoring, since the robots will be driving on a slippery material, changing directions may be somewhat difficult. In the experiments that were done, were the robots making any attempts to dodge, and was it carried out on a low friction surface where acceleration (including change of direction) is limited? We put four rover wheels on one of our older robots, and it was rather difficult to turn from a stop (without the trailer). With the trailer, it currently won't move at all, but that's primarily because we don't have the right wheels, and the wheels on it are too tight and will not rotate (they're omni wheels and it's stuck between two rollers).

One issue in keeping track of the robot is to know how many moon rocks etc it has in its possession at any given time. This is because I'm sure that some robots will just mass a large number and dump them all at the same time. While it will be difficult to count preloaded balls, those who use this strategy will likely load the maximum of 7.

On a related yet unrelated note, I intend on using an access database again this year so I don't have to file information on say 63 teams (the number of teams in our first regional), although that may happen anyways. In all likelihood, I'll probably end up entering some robot data directly into the database while watching the match since I get my forms in bursts of about 5 matches.