Success of practice bots

[Gray Adams]

We built a practice bot this year, and we won a regional for the first time in a decade. But personally, I don't think there's a strong correlation. Because of the structure of our shop hours, we don't iterate our designs post-build very well at all. We make almost no changes, except in software. And we did a LOT of software development leading up to each event, but due to bugs we never implemented it successfully on the competition bot.

So for us, it was basically a software development vehicle. We had a difficult time getting time and space to actually practice, so we did very little of that. There were plenty of times at competition where I looked a match we just played and though that if I had practiced a lot more, I wouldn't have made so many mistakes and could have driven more fluidly. There's probably more we could do to actually practice with the practice bot after build, but the energy level is low, the shop hours are basically non-existant, and with no available practice space, practice doesn't really happen.

Now, if we had a field that was always accessible, I think we would make much more use of it. But of course, it's always easy to talk about how much we could do if only we had x.