Best Feeder Bot of 2012

[jblay]

I'm a big fan of team 125 especially their robot last year and really their robot almost every year (including the fender bot they had this year), and I really hope this doesn't come off the wrong way because I have a lot of respect for the Nutrons, but I think their feeding strategy at IRI simply exploited flawed scouting. Most good human players could inbound a ball into the offensive zone at a rate above 90%. At IRI almost every alliance had a human player capable of inbounding the balls into their offensive zones at a rate around 95%. A strategy that takes a robot and removes it from other tasks in order to raise that rate to 100% make little sense in terms of winning a match or controlling the balls on the field. My view is that it makes more sense for a robot to pick up balls and put them into their offensive zone and let the inbounders do their job. Now if a team simply scouts how many balls a team puts into their offensive zone, this idea of how many more balls enter their zone as a result of what they are doing may not, and rarely will, be accounted for.