Design Help for offseason bot

[ToddF]

Sam,
Your team is embarking on a great exercise. You are starting a robot design with a completely blank slate, but with the ability to look back at how the game was most effectively played. If you do it right, this is a rare opportunity.

I'm going to suggest that you are putting the cart way before the horse. You are jumping into the design phase before you have done the most basic step: game analysis and establishing priorities. Before ever beginning to design our robot, our team always begins with the game analysis process we learned from Den Black. I encourage you to go through this process yourselves. You can learn about the details by watching the following two videos (one, two)

When you have done the analysis, post the results, and I'll be happy to give you some guidance on your design. But until you have decided how you will play the game, and prioritized your scoring actions, you aren't engineering; you're just winging it. You are jumping right into detailed design before you have defined the problem in a way that will guide you to a viable solution. That's probably the single biggest mistake in FRC, and it's nearly always fatal.

Check out my youtube channel to see how we approached the problem. We were fairly successful, and won two regionals this year. This does NOT mean that you should copy our robot. It's the process you need to learn, not how to copy the solutions of others.