Team update 16

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by DeepWater

Really? Teams that designed to be able to drive over the bumps never thought that they might also drive over a ball? Really? I thought most teams would have considered that early on during the design process. We sure did. That was one of the factors that steered us away from going over the bumps from the beginning. That and the higher likelihood of getting flipped over. We DESIGNED to minimize the likelihood of penalties from the beginning rather than leaving it as an after thought for the drivers to deal with on the field. We basically equated going over the bumps to a high likelihood of getting penalties and/or flipped over. We are only going through the tunnels instead for those reasons.

Even with an army of brainstorming sessions, going over a bump onto a ball resulting in a penalty never even crossed our minds. We're not geniuses, but we do consider ourselves to be "smart". It's simply impossible to play out every possible scenario beforehand, thus designing to be adaptable was higher on our priority list than designing to be perfect. I'm sure there were many other teams in the same boat. Even so, we only ever got one 3" incursion penalty and it was because we went head-to-head with another robot and they pushed their possessed ball under our robot.