Achieving Consistency

[OccamzRazor]

A lot of the things I have to say have been said but I can add a few. Most people overlook a couple of things such as combining designs to simplify your robot design. A lot of people this year combined their shooter and intake mechanism into one assembly which I thought was one of the better designs.

Simple machines have less failure points and better durability. I tried to convince my students to redesign our shooter/ intake into a single pivoting mechanism but they were married to what we had for whatever reason. But hey, we are a student led team so that is their machine and their decision.

One thing I try to push out to my students is that the robot is never complete and it can always be better. We don't have a 6 week build season. If you attend more than one event and you didn't win your first, change your machine using your allowable part limit of 30 lbs. That is 1/4 of your machine!

Design new parts for your machine in CAD (if you don't use cad, start) and plan to replace anything that does not work. If something does not work, don't try to use it during competition and remove it from your machine as useless weight. Use a practice robot chassis running or not to test these new designs since your robot will be in the bag. For regional participants this is more challenging but district model teams have their 6 hour time between events to implement.

Just like Karthik's presentation stated and one of the cleanest ways to state it I think: Chase perfection and achieve excellence along the way.