THOR NC 2016 Preview

[iyportne]

Originally Posted by Monochron

How do you guys usually handle drive team selection for off-season events? Is it always the drive team that you that you used in competition (if possible)? Do you keep as many drive team members from competition as you can for off-season?

For us it's not a hard and fast formula. We take a look at the turnover and pipeline and determine what skills we need to build. Since almost all of last year's team is returning, we are building and cataloging technology, allowing them to fill in the gaps and do the things they either didn't think of or had no time to do during last build and competition season. To test and develop technology, it made sense to eliminate drive team as a variable and use current drive team at THOR. This gives a richer content to the new students who are almost all freshmen and will likely be with us a longer time. If we lost all or most of the drive team like we did before last season, we chose drive team members for THOR from a variety of criteria like interest, commitment and skills measured at practice sessions and team meetings during the summer. If all things go as planned next year, we should also have a clone robot so we can then begin fielding different combinations of drive teams at THOR. It helps to have 2 or 3 functioning robots from different years to allow students to develop the interest and skills to drive, and if you have space, you can makeup challenging mini games that require programmers and drivers to develop skills. Of course when it comes purely to driving skill development, it helps to have a consistent drive train style. We have successfully deployed swerve for the last two seasons and plan to continue that trend.