2015 Week Zero Lessons Learned

[Chief Hedgehog]

-The field is small - cluttered.
-The view from the driver stations become very limited quickly (especially if 3130 is on your alliance)
-Coopertition is key.
-Drivers will have to make those robots dance! Hope you get enough time to practice (or have a robot ballerina that can pirouette)!

*Plus many of the robots at CenturionKrawler (2472&2052) were the size of horses - ours included.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

-The field is small - cluttered.
-The view from the driver stations become very limited quickly (especially if 3130 is on your alliance)

After practicing a while and making stacks, we realized quickly that it is very hard to see if you start making stacks in front of your driver station.
The field seems very small using just 1/2 of it.

Too bad we didnt get transparent totes!

One thing we noticed, where we made adjustments to our devices that grab the totes.....Some of the totes have tabs on the sides that are smashed in. We got them like that when shipped to us.
It makes a difference if teams are inserting "tabs" to grab/lift bins.
We are now accounting for it not knowing what kind of totes will be on the playing field at various events.

[jojoguy10]

The Corvallis (Oregon) High School Week 0 event went quite well for us!

Here are a couple things I noticed:

• The field does get quite messy
• There are some teams that specialize in one thing (e.g. just getting RC's)
• Getting totes from the feeder station is a lot easier than getting them from the Landfill (for our team)
• We were able to make 2 stacks of 3 totes (with an RC and litter) within the Teleop time
• Throwing the litter is pointless. It just gets on your side of the field and none of the robots we able to move it into the landfill
• Looking at the point above, I hope nobody will try to throw the litter and waste it (when they could go into RC's)
• For feeder station bots (like ours), it's hard to line up perfectly with the angle that the driver station is to the feeder

That's all I can think of for now. I think we learned a lot about strategies (e.g. working with specialized alliance partners to save steps) as well. Very informative!

[AlexD744]

Originally Posted by waialua359

One thing we noticed, where we made adjustments to our devices that grab the totes.....Some of the totes have tabs on the sides that are smashed in. We got them like that when shipped to us.
It makes a difference if teams are inserting "tabs" to grab/lift bins.
We are now accounting for it not knowing what kind of totes will be on the playing field at various events.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you have any pictures of what you're talking about?

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

-Drivers will have to make those robots dance!

Or programmers. We aren't there yet, but we hope to have a significant number of programmed "muscle memory" routines in time for Bayou on week 4. Our head coach's catch phrase for this season has been "Do the Thing!" Now that both the competition (Peabody) and practice (Atlas) 'bots are done, our programmers are working hard so that our robot can earn the nickname Zhu Li.