Robots by committee

[Eugene]

I agree with most of the posts on this topic. Here is what has been going on with my team.

There were a few people who came up with designs and tried to push the team to consensus. As always the arguments broke up. The first one was determining if it was possible to heard the balls with the bulldozer. This was crucial because if we could bulldoze the balls then we could also have the space for the 2x ball manipulator. After a few days of arguing in circles I got tired, ran down to the gym and got a few basketballs. By attaching a prototype plow to our old robot we tried to push the balls though a classroom door. Our result was that we only got three balls in ten minutes. That effectively showed a need for a more complex mechanism to deal with the balls.

Nevertheless, there were people who wanted to combine both features. I felt that we lacked the resources to implement both designs. After another day of arguing, I finally sat down and wrote everything that needed to get done this year. In the end there was not enough people to build the 2x manipulator.

Anyhow, here is my conclusion. Usually there are very few people on the team who have engineering experience (that is taking a concept and making it work) and plenty who can come up with general ideas and lack experience. My standpoint is that it is the duty of those few who know to enlighten the rest. When the final decision on the design comes, everyone on the team has to be behind it. It will be tough six weeks. The team needs to act as one. If talk stales, start writing things down to clear the disagreements up. If the problem is that you feel the design or the strategy is unfeasible – test.

Of course, if all fails have a deadline by which the person in charge will make his decision. After four year of FIRST I noticed that in the end it is almost never about which design you pick out of the few general ones, but how well you do it. The more you drag the talk, the less time you will have to perfect whatever you chose to do.

Eugene