Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design

[Ari423]

I would say on my team the biggest obstacle we encounter every year is sticking to our design parameters. At the beginning of the season, like most teams, we meet and discuss what part of the game we think is most important, and we brainstorm possible ways to play the game. However, after a little bit of prototyping and ordering some parts, we often forget what we decided we would focus on and begin working on other mechanisms we deemed less worthy of our time. Since we are a small team with limited resources, we often don't have a CAD team to design a robot before it's built or enough resources to play the entire game (rather than just play one part of it).

For example, in 2014 we decided that being able to pick up the ball off the floor was more important than being able to shoot or truss it. But after the first week, our head of the manipulator team started designing a launcher, before we even had an idea of how to pick up the ball. In the end of build, we had a robot with a catapult that could fire okay, but no pick-up mechanism, meaning our catapult was useless. Furthermore, the catapult was designed in a way that adding a pick-up mechanism was virtually impossible without completely rebuilding the robot, a task we could not do. We ended up only playing defense for the entire season, and it was the worst season for my team in recent memory.

Thankfully, last year (2015 season) we made more of a point to stick to our original design priorities and we had our best season since our founding in 1999.

In ancient literature, the hero's flaws can almost always be attributed to forgetfulness. Aeneas forgetting his need found Rome, Odysseus's forgetting to leave Circe, Theseus forgetting to raise the white sails, and many more examples. And forgetfulness still plagues us today. It's almost like they were trying to tell us something.