Hi! Just seeking out some teams’ strategies to finishing the season as quickly and efficiently as possible while also creating time for our driver team to practice!
Lots of this comes down to setting priorities and studying which objectives can be achieved quickly. The better Robot in 3 Days and MCC builds like Spectrum’s or 118’s Everybot focus on high achievability.
Now that we’re in Week 3, it’s more “take a long look in the mirror” time. Where is your build? Are you going to hit your goals? If not, what can you do to make sure you’ve got the most important ones done?
The best example I can share is from 2012, when 2815 immediately latched onto “okay, so a ball elevator and then some kind of turret to aim at the goals”. We got to the end of week 3, and we were still at “okay, so a ball elevator and then some kind of turret to aim at the goals”. It led to us holding a meeting, where I had to state the obvious: it’s week 3, nobody has a turret built, nobody has drawings of a turret, nobody has a COTS turret identified, the turret ain’t gonna happen. So we really boiled it down: two-point goals to start, from a known position on the field (the fender that protected the goals), and an elevator system to run the balls up so we didn’t have to shoot far (leading to higher accuracy). The end result was hardly a technological marvel, but Incocknito did get picked at Peachtree, won Palmetto as a backup, and eventually was immortalized by Peyton Yeung in one of his Deskbot miniature builds.
If you’re not confident that you can hit your goals, you’re at the end of Week 3 now. Time to have the talk.
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