pic: REX (Team 4334 - Alberta Tech Alliance)

[Gray Adams]

I don't know about you guys, but I would be pretty disappointed to show up to a regional and see 30 basic, support level robots and 20 robots that try to play the full game. It's the ideas that I see in every robot that makes it so much fun to go to competition. Winning is great and all, but how much does it really matter?

You only have a maximum of 4 years on a team, less if you join later. Especially for teams with a longer history, it's incredibly difficult to sit down and say you're not capable of building a robot to play the tougher elements of the game and you'll work up to it over a few years. The seniors will especially have trouble digesting this. It's easy for a rookie or 2nd year team to do it, but when you're a team that's been flirting with success but also encountering failure, it's hard.

Bomb Squad didn't go for a wheeled shooter even though they thought it would be better (maybe not better, can't remember what they said), they wanted the catapult because it was different (if any of that is inaccurate, I apologize). But that's the fun of this "sport". You can be inspired by some incredible ideas on robots that you thought were to crazy to work. It's so much fun to walk into the arena and see all the ideas your team went through, plus some that you never even considered. They're obviously not all going to win, and many probably will not even do well. But is that a reason to discourage teams from being ambitious and striving to have a robot that isn't a "safe" bet to build?

Even if you don't win any matches but your design is more or less validated by extremely similar elite robots, that doesn't mean you failed or should have set lower goals. Now, I'm not saying go crazy and try to build a robot that looks like this, but I think the teams that want to tap every available resource, evaluate their potential, and then push for just a little more than that, despite the inherent risk of failure, shouldn't be told building a simple support is better.