The missing feature: A common thread

[joeweber]

Experience is a great tool to have, but a better tool to have is funding and enough staff to implement it. If you have funding and staff you can by the extra material, build different prototypes and develop them into a perfect precision machine. With that funding you can build two robots and as one is bagged you can practice and develop the software and drivers ability. Having funding also can help if you can build a full field to do the practicing on. Once you have that you can make sure you pick your competitions so they are a few weeks in to let you work on the design and than your second competition is a few weeks later so you can fix from what you have learn at the last competition.
We have plenty of experience doing this for over 12 years and we know what we have to do but our funding limitations keep us from the best possible robot. Our work space has a low ceiling, we do not have a field to test on, we try to build some of the game pieces but it does not match a full built field. We have no professional engineers and our programmer has a full time third shift job. He has worked with students in programming but they are limited in what they can do.
We come really close this year to beating the top ranked teams and we are proud of our success. What we found is that the teams are labeled into two groups, the scoring group and defense group. If your robot does not do well you are termed a defense robot and pushed into playing defense during game by the experienced teams and than during the finals you are only picked if you are all that is left. We are experienced at this. A few years ago we decided not to be a defense robot and threw out low power and low speed. We design (to the best of our ability) or robot to be fast and focus on the highest points in the game. Last years game the highest points were the top row so we tried to design for that, this year the heist points were the top hoop and the bridge control. To get these points you must be fast and accurate. With the limited resources we could not build multiple shooters and found that because of the differences in the balls we could not shoot consistently to the top hoop. It would have been nice to find this out before we went to a competition but you deal with it the best you can. We did solve our problem but it was not nearly as perfect as the top teams. We will still keep working hard to beat the top ranked teams and be thorns in there play during competition.