pic: 1058 Low Expectations Render

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Bryce Clegg

Can we just take some time to appreciate the name Low Expectations. I'm going to show this to my team, that this is what good names are like

The name came from our late design change this year. At the end of week four of build season we had our two drivebases machined and driving over the defenses. We had a good batter catapult prototyped, solid concepts being worked on for scaling, a Portcullis/CDF manipulator designed, and an intake that hadn't been tested but was in our design. We didn't like how the catapult/intake were fitting in our model and felt to make it work we had to sacrifice the Low Bar from one end, possibly two.

We had a big team meeting that Saturday to plan out what we needed to focus on with two weeks left before scrimmage. Our goal was we had a Week Zero scrimmage in two weeks and whatever we sent there we wanted to closely resemble what we would be competing with at Reading in Week 2. After re-evaluating the game, we felt it was in our best interests to focus on solo-breaching, scoring a few balls down low, and potentially climbing knowing we had a better chance of building a scaler compared to dialing in a catapult.

So we spent a few more days coming up with a new intake from scratch that doubled as our Portcullis/CDF manipulator to make the robot even simpler, left space open for an eventual catapult, and focused a lot of the mechanical efforts on developing a climber with a two weeks to go.

While attending Week Zero we were asked what our robot's name was and we had occasionally joked around about calling it Low Expecations since it was a only a low bar & low goal machine with this feeling it wasn't enough. After a very successful day we knew we made the correct decision two weeks early so we stuck with the ironic name not knowing it would lead to several awards including three banners all from a group of very hard working students giving it their all this year.