If you could Breakaway all over again...

[BrendanB]

Hmm, well even with a decent robot there is always room for improvement so I'll take a shot at it.

Possessor, I wished we could have explored a pincher more. Our dual stage vacuum was really good (it has the power to pick up a trackball), but the ball had to be right where the suction cup was to get a hold on it. We added "active shepherding" which was two belts in front of our robot to pull balls from the side towards the suction cup which worked well but wasn't amazingly effective.

I wish we could have built a vertical hanger and hopefully using gas shocks like teams 67 and 1625. Our original impression was that if we could score just two balls in the time it takes us to hang then a hanger was a waste of weight and build However we didn't always have the time to score two balls in 20 seconds, and as we found on Archimedes, North Carolina, and IRI a hang could have been the difference between moving on or tying as we could score the same as our opponents but 4 bonus points would always give them a win.

Beside that there wouldn't be much I'd change, maybe used a different material instead of 80-20 to avoid the weight and moving of parts.

I would say 2010 was the best year so far for our team with one regional win, one finalist, captain and quarter-finalists on Archimedes and IRI, as well as various awards to go along with it made it a very good year for our team. Even with the changes to our robot we wouldn't have done spectacularly better, I'm satisfied with how far we went!

p.s. Happy Birthday Brandon!