Bad luck, or poor execution?

[nitneylion452]

You decide!

The Philadelphia regional ended today (congrats to all teams!) and I will start by saying that there was an extremely high level of competition and an almost omnipresent aura of Gracious Professionalism.

Now on to the main point of my thread. My team (3167 Environmental Tectonics Crusaders) fielded a robot, as one would expect. When we arrived, the robot had no pneumatics, which was planned. We spent hours adding all of the necessary components to our robot to make it work and pass inspection. It ended up being over-weight (which we knew and had a half decent plan for) and too long (though our measurements begged to differ). We had to remove our minibot deployment system and cut the frame down by 6.5" all in day 1 just to pass inspection.

Once we had all of that done (13 hours of work later) we were very excited for the start of the qualifying round. We had very high expectations for this year because our robot was a great deal more sophisticated this year. Our first match didn't go well and we did not score a tube. The main reason for this was that our driving seemed to be very off, our drivers would twist left and the robot would rotate right. We attempted to fix this, but with no success (we believe that the issue was our encoders, one on each wheel, were "arguing" with each other, but we didn't think of this until it was too late).

Without going in to much more detail, our robot managed to score no tubes. We had several chances, but various things were wrong, such as the tower did not go high enough to score the tube, and the tube bouncing onto the scoring peg, and bouncing back off (which I didn't see happen to anyone else, and needless to say, I was quite disappointed).

I don't want this to be misconstrued as a "woe is me" type thread. I honestly want you all to ask questions about out operations, offer feedback, and, for the teams that were at this event, comment on what you saw from my team. I'm looking for constructive criticism.

Thanks in advance for all of your feedback!

P.S. For those of you at Philly, I was the coach for 3167, in case I met any of you and neither of us are aware of it!

EDIT:

In particular, I want to give a big shout out to team 3553 who made it to the second (or third?) round of the eliminations! I was very excited to see that robot play the game and you played wonderful defense. The design was genius, and I really enjoyed seeing your bot in action.