The strategy of your robot tells you what kind of a robot you want to build. At the beginning of design process, you and your team should sit down, figure out exactly what you want your robot to accomplish during matches, and use those requirements as guide lines for how your robot/components will be built.
Obviously there are different issues you have to think about when designing the robot, such as motors limit, or weight and space consideration, how much juice you can get out of the battery… But you also have to fit your strategy around all those parameters.
Say, you want to build an extension tail that reach to the home zone. So, part of your strategy would be, “To extend something into the home zone, so the robot won’t need to rush into home zone the last 5 seconds”. Well, not only did that save you a lot of trouble to somehow figure out a good drive system that can rush into home zone the last 5 second, but it also tells you what kind of “tail” you need to build.
Let’s see, it will have to have a good 15~20 feet extension… It won’t have to be powerful, and it has to be quick to work within 5 seconds. So, from that, you figure out you can use some really light material, and a weak motor that need to be pretty fast… And whether you want to be able to point the tail at different directions or not.
See… This kind of things…
As someone suggested above, you can’t score any balls if you can’t get a goal into the goal zone… So, you can’t really build a ball robot without something to get goals in the zone…
Or say like, when the robot is in a pushing war, it really doesn¡¦t need a whole lot of speed in that situation, so that save you the trouble from trying to add more motors for both speed and pushing force.
The strategy dictates exactly how you robot will be moving, where its components will need to be point at, and how much of everything you need. You will have to design a robot where you push your components at the most efficient and effective position, or else you will be wasting time driving the robot around dong different maneuvers.
If all you want to do is to get two goals into zone, then maybe you don’t need a ball mechanism after all… Or if all you want to do is balls, and let your partner take care of the goals, then you don’t necessary need a strong robot, do you?
So, I strongly recommend you take care of your strategy first. Build your strategy around what your team is capable of building, and how much time it will take to make your robot accomplish certain task within the strategy, and prioritize what’s most important and what’s not, so in return you have an easier schedule during build period to finish what’s most important on your robot first.
