I’ll cut straight to the point here: how do you ensure your alliance partners (usually 2nd pick) won’t break and will remain functioning in matches? We have had some rough experiences with 2nd picks breaking and backup robots not functioning and I’m wondering how teams pick and analyze robustness and likelihood of breaking through scouting or other mediums.
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Well one way of ensuring that your third bot won’t break is to provide them with resources and assistance.
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Point here is, how do you pick robust robots that won’t break in the first place?
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Well you can look at their robot and use your judgement to see if they look robust. You can also track how often a robot broke or died during quals.
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Technical pit scouting. Just look at it. We do an electrical inspection after we pick them as well
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Look for good practices in control systems and electrical wiring. Look for teams that use POE injectors AND the barrel jack for redundant radio power. Make sure that their electronics are secured and not vulnerable to other robots or the deadly corner of the cargo ships. You can also scout battery setups. If a team doesn’t have at least 8 good (non-KOP) batteries don’t pick them.
edit: number of batteries isn’t the best indication of a good battery setup as pointed out by many replies. Many teams are very successful with fewer batteries. Perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate this rule of thumb.
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Take them to the practice field and drop them off Hab 3?
I do think you can go system by system pretty quickly to look for weaknesses and maybe see how repairable they might be. Quality is a desirable trait that you can see to some degree. You might still find yourself on the wrong side of a match if you bypass a team with questionable quality, just because of luck, but overall picking robots that you can trust to work as expected is a good choice.
It also is worth considering the risk to different systems and if you lose a subsystem how that might change strategy. I saw a team ziptie their arm in place after quarterfinal 1 so that they could effectively play defense after a problem. Maybe that isn’t such a loss. But certain system losses might be more detrimental. So you could rank these accordingly when scouting each team. If you need hatches, look for the mechanism that is built tough, even if a team has a rickety hatch mech that delivers more, because it could take one bad hit to take it all away.
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If your ethernet cable isn’t clipped in all the way and not providing power, then its also probably not providing data, so having the barrel jack in there kinda doesn’t do anything.
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The power connection on whatever POE setup you have can come loose.
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Yes but you’d also not have data going through either.
Or give them a battery or two 
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The data will still go through if the power on the POE is disconnected. The power goes over the unused twisted pairs.
Fair enough, i’m not saying id never pick a team with less than 8 batteries, but if you want to be extra careful of dead bots that’s something to look for.
It should be a big part in studying for your picks. If a robot is obviously not robust they are a lower priority. And if you’re not sure, you can have a mechanically inclined person take a look at them beforehand. You can always ask if they need any help mechanically (or in other fashions, since robustness does include many aspects of the robot) and help them out if they want it. If they do have a problem that’s simple to fix, you can easily have a dark horse pick with this method.
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+1
Batteries arent always the best thing to gauge them off of. Our 2nd pick at Marrysville was having issues with their batteries and we ended up supplying them batteries for playoffs.
The best way to get a good 2nd pick is playing with them if possible. We played with 7192 and really liked how robust they built their bot, along with their effective defense. Just look at how their robot is built and quality of the bot. The hardest part about it is who knows how they will break. There have been times that as the captain we have broke, failing our alliance. Anybody can break at any time for nearly any reason, you can prevent it but just lend a hand when possible and be prepared for the worst.
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Check bumpers. Bumper quality requires attention to detail and is probably directly proportional to the mechanical, electrical, and software reliability of the robot.
unless you are 1323, that picture has been floating around recently 
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There’s a few things that I would do. First is looking at the scouting data. If they only move for half their matches they’re probably not a good pick. Second, right after alliance selections go over to their pit and find somebody to talk to. Ask them about any know issues and if they have any try to diagnose them and fix them. Then I would ask them if you can look at their robot. Have somebody who knows electrical well check their wiring for any loose connections or anything and somebody who knows mechanical to make sure everything is tight and working. However, for all of this make sure that when you are trying to help them that you don’t get in their way if they are working on something.
If a robot’s primary point of contact isn’t robust, it’s possibly a red flag hinting at the rest of their robot not being robust.
My team has a scouting stat called dead time. Here we write how many seconds during a match the robot stopped moving/died or had a major malfunction. Then this stat is taken into account together with all the others to rank the robots in a priority order.
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We scouted based on the number of points an individual robot put up each match. Knowing that you get three points for getting off Level 1 and three points for getting back onto Level 1, anyone not putting up at least six points per match was copy-pasted to the bottom of our list just above anyone that was on Does Not Play Well With Others status.
(If I remember, we actually did a similar chop at 10 points/match at Smoky Mountains. Sure enough, no robot deaths there or at Palmetto.)
Based on our experience at one event, how do you ensure your alliance captain will climb and their first pick won’t break?
Usually the higher ranking teams are more robust and more organized. Usually.