Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay TenBrink
What are some of the painful pitfalls your team has fallen into when brainstorming the game/robot that you know to avoid now that you're older and wiser? What will you do to avoid these pitfalls in the future?
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Over the years, we've built a few robots that haven't lived up to our pre-season expectations. The major reason for our failures has been that we underestimated what was necessary to be a top tier player of the game. During brainstorming, we sometimes dismiss ideas as not being possible only to find out later that the best teams successfully built the impossible. Sometimes our brainstorming process fails to lock in on the single most important element of the game (ball control in 2010, hurdle cycle time in 2008) and we don't properly prioritize it.
Other years we get the first two parts right, but we settle for good enough without realizing that other teams are building better machines behind closed doors. We don't realize it until after ship. The past two years we have been able to fix our deficiencies by making modifications at events, but other years we aren't able to overcome the poor decisions we made in the first couple weeks.
We haven't figured out how to fix the problems yet. Maybe we'll get it right this year.