The Quest for Einstein

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I think we've built niche robots in each year of 2013, 2014 and this year. . . This year we focused on cangrabbing and were not extraordinary at stacking, just very reliable. . . We built our robot to fit a role in an alliance--just good enough.

I think we are talking about two different scales here. To many teams the fact that you were "reliable" at stacking AND you focused on cangrabbing means that you were not a niche robot. To most teams a niche robot is one who does one or two non-main-scoring activities well and typically doesn't do other activities.

Even in 2014 your robot could play most any role very effectively, it is just that at your level of play there were other robots who did other tasks better than your robot could. So naturally you fall into roles. That is just a natural part of competition, that robots will fill roles that they excel at. The fact that you could fill most any role (and do so better than a large amount of teams) means that you weren't really a specialist.