Observations after week !

[FRC1672]

Originally Posted by Liz Smith

From what I noticed, a lot of teams are not communicating effectively to their alliance partners.

Before the match, talk to your alliance partners. Make sure their payload specialist knows what your robot looks like, how it loads moon rocks, maybe you're going to want them to feed you empty cells, maybe you want them to throw a super cell into your robot so you can effectively deliver it across the field, maybe you want them to hold their moon rocks during autonomous so they can human load your robot.

Many times at NJ, did I see a robot at the outpost waiting for an empty cell (and the drivers yelling, waving, and banging on the players station glass), while the Payload Specialist just stared blankly at the rest of the field because they didn't even realize it was their alliance partner wanting to be fed.

A successful super cell exchange for the most part, will involve at least 2 of the teams on the alliance. The PS at the outpost, the robot delivering, and the PS at the fueling station. Communication and teamwork within the alliance is the key to this game IMO.

In response to that, Our team PS was in the outpost most often, he actually liked it there. We converted at LEAST 1 empty cell to a SC in all of our matches except our first practice match, we were having communication issues with the field. Only our robot really focused on running empty cells. We were really successful in that and I believe in part why are average placement throughout the qualifiers was 9th, went as low as 5th, and finished at 14th.

Autonomous mode suggestions: have at least 3 autonomous codes 1 for each stating position. You are allowed to have a switch on your robot and when the switches are in a certain alignment you can start one way as opposed to the other. Also if you alliance partner does not have an autonomous mode it is not a death sentence but it does not help. Teams please just add a drive straight at least. And if you have proficient programmers program one of your robots autonomous starts to knock into your alliances robot this way you move them.
What our teams autonomous was in normal matches we drove almost directly to our human player so he could pass us an empty cell. we also had alternatives to knock our alliance members out of score positions of opposing HPs.

One final good note, I really liked the presentation of 1676's scouting system. It was ordered by the average points scored and points scored against. The net points column really helped highlighting strong teams who may have had not so good alliances. I suggest that at every regional this scouting system is used because it really helped to show good teams.

In conclusion i really enjoyed week 1 of Lunacy at the NJ regional.