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Re: Curie 2010!
I won't try to explain or explain away too much of our season, but maybe a bit. Been doing this for eight years as a mentor, first with an inner city team I founded as a teacher there, and now with 1391. Our virtually all-rookie team this year came together as a unit - in terms of ingenuity and confidence and capability - in ways that were remarkable to me. Best year I've ever had with a team.
Our robot - we can kick (and usually score) all balls from any zone in autonomous. We have an interesting drive base with a combination of plactions-on-pods for both high traction and maneuverability over the bump and omnis on the other end for high mobility. Even though we can push with the best of them we can also fine-scale our movement for precision driving. Our kicker is dial-adjustable to any force required and set by operator continually during the match, so if a short ball move is best, we do it, but if sending it 30 feet in the air is a good idea, we do that. We swapped out drivers after our first regional, and the new guy is the best driver I've ever had - a real sense of how to work the robot well and a very cool head - clearly not fazed by pressure or noise or anything else - he remains in the zone regardless. End game we consistently hang on any of the the vertical bars in 'strongman' fashion, and at our second competition the 2 times we did not do this was because it wasn't in the alliance strategy - we had other roles to play during endgame. At Drexel, we were in the seventh alliance against the eventual regional winner, and without a doubt the first match was simply the most total domination of a high alliance by a low alliance I have ever seen - all three of our alliance robots worked well together and my kid/robot in defense completely shut done two very high scorers working simultaneously in their offensive zone - he was a defensive maniac. We won 10-3 (all of their balls I believe were scored in auton.) Second match we suffered a failure of our power control board of all things - nothing we could either engineer against during the build nor see coming. We were winning the second match when this happened and, dead on the field, our alliance lost that match by a close margin. third match, even after fixes, checks and double checks, the same disaster struck again (we could not swap out the PD board but thought we had managed a work-around.) Lost that too. I believe we could have done quite well without the PD crapping out on us - it's been solved and we're ready to go in this event.
Good luck to all and hope each of us gets what we're looking for from the event - we're shooting to win the whole thing, as I bet we all hope to do!
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