was there anything unique about the robots that placed 1st through 10th last year?

FIRST General Forum
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was there anything unique about the robots that placed 1st through 10th last year? if there was what was so unique? :confused: :confused: :confused: :confused:

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They all did at least one thing very well, consistently

They all had good drivers, and strategists

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Not to mention a bit of luck

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A few things that tend to get teams to the top ten.

Reliability The ability to be at full strength for every match is important.
Driver ability Having the mechanisms on the robot work isnā€™t any good if the driver canā€™t use them. (With some exceptions, like 45s auto balance from 2001)
Strategy Understanding the game. This may seem simple, but there are teams to go out that donā€™t completely understand how the scoring works. The teams that do, do better because they make better decisions during the match.

Wetzel

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Team 1002 placed first in Peachtree last year. What we did:

We did one thing extremely well (hung on the bar). Our design was such that it was impossible to be pushed off the bar once we were on. Literally the only way to get it off, short of ripping of the frame, was to use a 5 foot pole to press a little lever then lift the robot off.

We had very good strategy. Most of our points came from ā€˜usingā€™ our ally effectively. Weā€™d base our tactics around the strengths of the other team. We knew these strengths because our scouting database had complete information on all of the teams and matches at the regional.

We had very good humans. Our driver had designed the controls himself, so he knew exactly what he was doing. Our human player made 19/20 shots.

In short, these exact examples may not help you, but the general ideas stay the same every year.

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I was at VCU, and the circuit runners were a great team that year. Really, their scouting database and net access greatly improved the quality of the comp for me and my team.

But more on topic, everything he said was very true. The CRā€™s did one thing well, which was a good idea last year, and probably will be this year.

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I believe your team must have a certain goal to succeed at certain levels of the game. our goal was to hang at the end of every match possible. and we accomplished that 95% of the time. the other thing is have many different ā€œplaysā€ to do while during a match. we had about 10-15 plays and many of them were based on the conditions of the match and time. like said in an above post, we got very lucky in Newton division to have some great partners and some great competition. I say it is around 65% confidence, 10% skill and 25% knowing all there is to it about the years game.

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You guys pointed out a lot of good things. One thing is that a robot should be reliable to do certain things if you want it to win. It should be able to do it consistently and well. Those robots are most likely to win. Since I am on the drive team, I Cantrell you that field experience(drive team) counts a big load. Getting used to the field languageā€¦ art of handling the botā€¦ co-operating with other teamsā€¦ etc. It takes a while before you learn everything. You cant expect being on the drive team for the first time and win a regional, its just not likely. One thing Corey and I learnt this year is that our robot is fragile in some ways. For e.g. At PARC in one of the earlier qualifying matches I hung right under 341s bot, and they forced us down. I knew our wiring system was in big danger, but i still tried to lift up, and I burnt the whole wiring system of our arm. At that point Corey and I learnt that we cant do things the robot is not meant to or cant take. When we learnt certain things, we started winning competitions. So it did take us a while before we learnt things about being on the drive team, and now weā€™re no more a rookie drive team and hopefully can perform better this upcoming season.
Hope that post helped a bit
-Bharat

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Experience is definitely a huge huge plus. We went from barely being able to compete(because we knew nothing) to almost sweeping the MidAtlantic offseason events because we knew how the game is played and when/when not to do certain things.
Just to back up with a few stats-NJ-QFists
Annap-QFists
Nats-Did not place
Parc-QFists
Frenzy Finale-Winners
DotD-Champs
BE-Finalists
RR-Champs

And when we did break down at PARC, we were able to use our experience to find ways to win the game. After the match we fried the wires, we swept the rest of qualyā€™s and had an incredibly intense 3 match battle with 222.

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The thread title implies that this discussion should be about the robots. All is see so far is everything but.

So, did they shift gears?

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