Simple things you can do to make your bot/team perform better

[Kevin Sevcik]

I'll say something.... I think many, many rookie teams should sit down and honestly tell themselves what their robot can do and how long it will realistically take to do so. Then write it down, memorize it, and leave yourself enough time in a match to do what you plan. At GLR and on the VCU and Portland webcasts, I saw many teams that spent time herding balls, blocking people, etc, and then lost a match cause it took them longer to hang or cap than they expected. Honesty with yourself and your alliance mate can only help you do better.

Heck, thanks to my poorly designed transmission, our robot was stuck in low gear for all of GLR. But we knew that we'd never get high gear to work in that timeframe, so we went with that and just crawled to the center of the field and hung. We did remarkably well and actually got picked for an alliance.