Team 95 2017 Build Thread

[JamesCH95]

Starting early this year!

After the game reveal we considered what would be the most effective way to score points. Crude analysis below.



We then brainstormed some ideas on how to play the game. I will not attempt to justify any of their names, and ran them through a weighted decision matrix to help us pick a design.



Using these analyses we concluded that scoring GEARs and climbing would be the best way to generate points and thus deserve a high priority in our design and build efforts. A stunning conclusion for sure.

However, this game is quite well-designed. Focusing on GEARs and climbing will only enable winning if you are tremendously better than the opposing alliance because of the discrete, and increasingly difficult, gear scoring tiers. For example: an alliance that can deliver 11 GEARs cannot out-score an alliance that can only deliver 6 GEARs, all else being equal. So we concluded that we should have some capacity to score FUEL. Also, a stunning conclusion.

We created a number of layout sketches, made prototype mechanisms, and evaluated these in the quite-restrictive sizing volume. It because obvious that scoring in the low FUEL goal would adversely affect our GEAR and climbing performance, so we have chosen to score FUEL in the high goal. We do not intend to focus volume, weight, or design effort on shooting as with the other two mechanisms. This will likely result in a low total scoring potential, but the idea with scoring FUEL in the high goal is merely to edge-out over an alliance that can score a similar number of gears. A small number of points should do the trick.

With that, we have started to model our robot. I will post some screen shots of that soon.