Pitfalls to avoid when brainstorming the 2011 game and robot

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Jay TenBrink

The first several days after the kickoff are when most crucial robot design directions and game strategy are determined.

What are some of the painful pitfalls your team has fallen into when brainstorming the game/robot that you know to avoid now that you're older and wiser? What will you do to avoid these pitfalls in the future?

Here a big one we’ve suffered from multiple times and what we’ll do to avoid a repeat:

Falling back on a familiar and comfortable robot design from the past and adapting it to the new game.

We did this in 2009 when we basically cloned our 2006 robot. We never let ourselves get beyond the idea that we needed to shoot the balls one at a time instead of considering the possibility of handling them in bulk and dumping them. We also did this in 2005 when we could actually play the 2005 game with our 2004 robot with almost no changes. In both examples we could have done much better if we had forced ourselves to conceptualize new ideas, role-play the game, and develop alternatives before making the final decision on our direction. Instead we got tunnel vision.

It's good to learn from experience. It's better to learn from somebody else's experience.

Make sure you THOROUGHLY understand the rules of the game before you actually start designing the robot.
It completely stuns me when I see a team show up at an event with a misdesgined robot that is not prepared to compete in this game due to lack of understanding of how to properly pay the game that could have easily been solved by simply taking a day or so to understand how to play the game instead of rushing in with a vague idea of what to do due to the animation.