Drive Team Configuration

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

I take that as a challenge: see you at the regionals. I will do in the best of my abilities to program a very competitive, fully autonomous robot.

Nice, good luck with that, but I would recommend you don't discard the advice given by some highly respected FRC members. From a programming perspective, that would be awesome; however, from a strategist/scout I would never pick your team in eliminations. Looking back, our team with some more controls and sensors could have probably programmed our 2008 speed racer to run laps autonomously.*** Would that have been cool, yes. Would it have been the most effective strategy, no. Why? Because when we did compete with it during the off-season we used that lap bot to not only run laps, but our driver would play defense at the same time such as knocking balls away/out of grabbers and stuff like that making it a highly obnoxious opponent. I was behind the glass during a few of those matches and found the on the fly choices genius.

Another note, how many FRC robots have successfully completed their autonomous program repeated in the exact same way every match? Along the same idea, how many robots have done the exact same things in each and every match? FLL robots compete on tables with no other robot interaction and most of them cannot pull off 400 points consistently every round all the time.

I am not doubting your programming skills, it is A match strategy, but it isn't the ONLY of most EFFECTIVE strategy. Consider the amount of time it would take to program/test/debug all of that code in 2 minute matches. I would rather take all that time to train drivers how to play the game and react to different strategies.

1519 has done the usual driver for the chassis and moving the robot, operator for the manipulators, coach for direction, and human player to do the human player things. In 2009 we gave the control of picking up balls to our driver instead of our operator too ease communication between the two.

Merry Christmas!!

***http://www.mechanicalmayhem.org/teamvideos.asp