paper: The Big Decision - Mid-Season Design Change - Cyber Blue - 234

[Chris Fultz]

After the 2013 Boilermaker Regional, our team faced a difficult challenge and difficult decision. We had incorporated a unique design for the disc handling system on our robot and it was not performing at the level we felt we needed to be competitive at the upcoming Crossroads Regional and for the Championship event.

The team worked through a detailed process and plan to facilitate a decision. We then made a decision for a change and implemented it for the remainder of the season.

This paper describes our initial design, the options evaluated, the factors we considered to make our decision and our final implementation. The paper ends with a data summary of the impact to our "on-field" performance.