why sooo many bad robots in 07

[Karthik]

Instead of jumping on Shaun's choice of words, can we focus on the issue he's brought up? The FRC is much more exciting when there are more quality robots on the field. A drop in quality across the board is a serious issue. I believe there are a few factors.

- As pointed out, many teams have tried to do too much this year
- Not enough attention paid to manipulator design
- With the Banebot difficulties, teams had to spend more time on their drivetrains, especially at their initial event. (Installing new carrier plates)
- In past games we had full specifications for our task. Last year we knew there was a 4' foot ramp with a 30* incline. This year teams were forced to try and figure out what the specifications would be. This was a great challenge, and simulates a real world engineering decision. Unfortunately many teams made poor assumptions. (28" is wide enough for a ramp, we only need to climb 15*, etc.)

If you want to talk about why all robots are great and how "it's not about the robot", do it in a different thread. Let's leave this thread to discuss what's caused the drop in quality, and what we can do in the future to improve it.