The missing feature: A common thread

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by JesseK

For anyone who can't make it to Karthik's 105-minute "Strategy" presentation in St. Louis on Wednesday, I'll go ahead and give you the first few lines in my notes from the last 2 years' presentations (summarized):

• His name is Karthik and his team wins alot. His teams proactively seeks to help other teams as well.
• When determinining where time and resources are spent, there IS a priority order on every team regardless of whether that priority order is explicitly stated.
• The #1 priority is the thing that MUST work every match to be able to do anything, and that is DRIVE TRAIN.
• The #2 priority is the FIRST thing the game piece touches before it can be scored and that is the game pieces ACQUISITION MECHANISM.
• Robot functions should work 100% and not be some over-constrained half-thought-out almalgamation of metal and motors.
• This implies that if priorities are out of order, then the pickup function may suffer the most due to spatial and weight constraints.

Ergo, if the first thing a team designed on the robot this year was a shooting mechanism then there's a good chance the intake mechanism was a secondary priority. That means there was less brainstorming time and more constraining factors given to that mechanism overall. I know that as Week 1 progressed, this is what wound up happening on my team.

If you look at the original post, all the "missing features" related to game piece acquisition. Actually, that makes so much sense.