We were doing some last minute driving. (1 day before ship) So our head mentor wanted to see who the best driver was. We gave everyone an equal chance buy that was our mistake. That member drove the robot into the wall and broke our right arm. I just wanted to get that off of my chest. I sort of feel bad since we will be at the competetion with a busted robot.
This year’s playing field is full of walls, and you will undoubtedly hit them multiple times… that’s the nature of the game. If your arm broke after a single impact, then it wasn’t yet robust enough for the competition. Testing and redesigning are big parts of the engineering design process. Be grateful that you’ve discovered this design flaw early, rather than at a critical point in the competition, and also be grateful that you’ll have all day Thursday at your regional to reinforce your design and practice before it counts. You may be surprised at how rewarding this process is going to be. Best of luck!
Not telling you what to do about the situation, but a warning. Other members of the Chief Delphi community will see your post soon and give you lots of “constructive” criticism on when/where it is viable to voice your opinion on said matter. Just thought I’d give you fair warning.
Perhaps you might want to take this to FIRST-a-holics Anonymous instead? I don’t know that airing your team’s dirty laundry in public will really help anything. I’m certain that it won’t help anything at all if this other team member comes across this thread.
The way I usually look at these things is that what’s happened has happened. At this point, you have a decision to make, stay angry at this person until and during your regional competition and do nothing about your robot, or start looking for and implementing solutions to the problem. You have/had FIX-IT windows in which you can make replacement, spare, or upgrade parts for your robot, so all hope is not lost. Your team still has a chance to pull together and recreate/rebuild your arm in the next few weeks. If you can’t do this, you still have other options. Racing robots are doing surprisingly well this year. You could make plans to strip down your robot into a lean racing machine and focus on autonomous programming to score as many points as possible during autonomous mode. I can guarantee you that whatever regional you’re headed to, the teams there will be very willing to help get your robot back in shape if you ask them. You could modify your robot to be a herder instead of a lifting robot, the options are endless, but only if your team can make a clean break with the past. The more you cling to the misfortunes that have already befallen you, the less you’ll be able move forward from here.
As team president and a member of the drive team I believe I have faced several stressful situations–most recently when a team member attempted to bend our arm a few degrees and ended up shearing several rivets (leverage is a powerful thing). At this point there was nothing getting angry would do–instead I got a drill rivet gun and started repairs. One of the most valuable things to have in a competition is a level head. Even if you are angry at that member keep it to yourself and focus on the larger issues at hand. Screaming at someone is far less likely to solve your problems. Also I firmly believe that everyone will screw up at some point your team member simply happened to do so at an unfortunate time. Do you want people to attack you for your mistakes?
Venting is ok. We all need to vent once in a while. :yikes:
Just remember your whole team is feeling the stress of having a broken robot now, and the person who did it probably feels bad about it as well.
That said, as jgannon said above, this game will involve a lot of interaction with the walls this year.
While I don’t know what exactly caused the damage to your robot, be sure that many other teams broke stuff before they shipped as well during some testing.
What you need to do now in my opinion, is rally your team together with a plan to fix it when you get to competition on Thursday.
You shipped a robot (or all the parts of a robot at least).
Congratulations on that accomplishment!
Here’s the good news: You have some time until your competition to form an attack plan as to how to fix your robot.
Now you just need to make that plan, stick with it when you get to the competition, and get yourself back in the game!
Good luck!
We’ve all been there before btw.
No one team in FIRST has ever shipped a perfect robot that never failed, or never broke throughout the season.
If we found the secret to doing that, it would take a lot of fun (re: stress, excitement, pressure, etc etc…) out of the game, and make for a boring competition. And trust me. The competitions are anything BUT boring.
I think of all the words to describe a FIRST competition, the word boring would be last on the list. (or pretty darn close to last anyways).
One last thought. These robots are not pieces of art. They are working machines. While most of them are sexy pieces of “art” in their own sense, they aren’t meant for looking at.
They are meant for playing with and testing to their limits!!
You’ve tested yourself to your limits by dedicating 6 weeks of your life to the construction of your robot.
Now go out there and test your robot’s limits on the field!!
If it breaks… learn from that, fix it, and get out there and test it again!!
The most fun part of this competition is not building the robot in my opinion.
(My teammates on the Mechanical part of my team would say that statement was enough to be convicted of treason right there! :ahh:) lol
Anyways, the most fun part to me is getting to the competition, and testing the limits of the machine you poured your heart and soul and time, and sleepless nights (& days) into.
When you are able to push your robot to the same limits on the field that you pushed yourself through during the build season is definitely when you will have the most fun!
Oh I’m sure you’d all like to see the video of when our autonomous crashed…
Without bumpers…
Into a column…
At full speed…
Well we did prove a few things though:
1] Must not have been a structural column (building is still standing)
2] The arm mechanicals section of the robot makes a great frontal offset collision crumple zone.
3] The aluminum robot is mightier than the plaster.
4] RALFF doesn’t carry any auto insurance. :ahh:
Moral of the story: Crashes happen, things break… SHIFT HAPPENS (especially on fast robots 
). Part of life. sonicx: I wish you and your team best of luck repairing your robot at Peachtree.
-q
Hmmm someone might have said this already. But arent you glad that he crashed it in practice rather than in the actual competition where it may cost you a match? I am sure you will get the bot fixed and try to find ways to prevent this from happening when it really matters. Everyone makes mistakes, I dont think it was on purpose. 
Now take your anger and use that energy into rebuilding that arm. Trust me if 1 crash into the wall did it, then it wouldn’t have lasted 1 match. This is a robot parts flying off and ducking kind of game. Every round I have watched ,parts are being picked up off the field. We had everything from screws, gears and wheels on the field at the comp. I was at. This is a rough game, more so than I would have thought. Lots of damage is being done during hybrid mode. Also seen a few balls getting “booted” out of the field:D
You vented, now hope that you don’t make a mistake and have a teammate put it out for the world to see!!
When bad things happen, teams have 2 choices:
1> they can sulk and look for someone to blame (but this is counter productive and will not fix a thing) or …
2> They can go about fixing whats broken.
Truthfully, it’s up to you and your team, but if I were you I’d be planning on how to fix that arm and thanking the person who was driving when it broke (rather than getting angry at them) because otherwise it would have broken on the playing field when it really mattered.
There’s something to be said about a never say die attitude 
Well i am over it now.
Cool. Some of those responses above make you think, huh? If you saved any of the broken pieces, mount them on a plaque for the ‘bad’ driver.
It’s better to break a robot before ship than at a competition. When we were practicing before ship we actually tried to break the robot to see where the fail points would be. I nice to know where you robots gonna break before you ship because finding out in the matches on Saturday is not the best thing to do.
Just as a side note anonymously posting has backfired in the past. I personally know of one occurrence where it’s caused more hurt feelings because someone saw the post and immediately knew who they were talking about.
Gracious Professionalism should extend to your teammates as much as it does to other teams if not more so. Last weekend I heard a drives teams uses f-bombs at a human player who had cost them a match with a penalty in Florida. The kid is human and he made a mistake. Lasts I heard there are no Gods currently working on FIRST teams and thus we are all prone to make mistakes. You learn from them and move on. To use that kind of abusive language in the view of others is inexcusable.
2 years ago, my team gave an award to one such individual… it was a glide mounted to a plaque.
Apparently the story behind it was that 4 years ago, the person picked up the glide, and it fell off the track, and all the bearings fell out. I think the cost of the part was upwards of $200, needless to say it was ruined.
Everyone had a good laugh when the award was presented.
As the wise and powerful Baker once said to us, “Break it early” and “Celebrate Mistakes”. These both can and will help you improve in the future.
It’s not like it was on purpose. Your being extremely mean. I’m sure the kid already feels bad, but now your letting the whole FIRST community know that they messed up. What on earth is the purpose of this thread? Go tell your best friend, not us. (This isn’t meant to be a mean reply, but this post was bashing it’s own team member. That isn’t right.) Think before you post.
Echoing what some other people have said…
It could have been worse (much worse), it could have been at the competition in the last match, similar to what I did:
It was the last match for us, we were ranked #15 (although we got lucky in a few matches) and we knew that this match would determine if we got picked for eliminations or not. Even if we didn’t win (we didn’t expect to because our alliance partners were having some tech problems) we had to perform well to show that we were good. So during the match, everyone is yelling, I panic and turn the robot full speed around the corner. I misjudged the corner and hit another robot at 18fps with our PVC gripper down. Needless to say the PVC exploded into a lot of pieces, the impact popped our main drive chain off so we couldn’t move, we got a penalty for high speed ramming, a yellow card for the same thing, and our robot was turned off for aggressive driving.
I can almost guarantee you that I felt the worst out of anyone at the competition that day and had utterly let my team down. Now I would guess that your friend probably feels just as bad and just try not to give them a hard time. I know you might be over it this time, but the same idea extends to anytime this may happen. Just try to fix whatever may be broken and make sure the person doesn’t feel too bad, because FIRST not just about robots, it’s also about people and learning to interact with them.
Hope this helps everyone and not just the original poster. Remember that someone out there has probably done something worse.
-Greg P.