Competition Lessons Learned

2014 FRC Regional

On the field

1. Handles to carry robot on/off field
2. Simple startup procedure for on-field
3. Minimalist Driver Station for Classmate, Joystick and (possibly) physical buttons/switches.
4. It'd be better to have physical switches or buttons rather than relying upon the digital ones on the DriverStation.
5. Bullet-proof game strategies are far easier to stick to (e.g., 1501's strategy) because fewer things can go wrong.
6. Student coaches rock! Some teams had mentor coaches, but we think having students serve in all roles is far better.
7. Scouting is critically important, especially when being on a team that selects alliances. We really could have used a list of teams (numbers and names and maybe even bot pictures) in preferential order so that during alliance selection the team captain can simply cross out the teams as they are selected

Design

1. Simple & robust designs rock. Ours was super solid, and as a result we actually had no problems and needed no repairs.
2. Defensive: the ability to protect the ball during possession meant nobody could knock the ball away from us. This is contrary to almost all the other bots at the STL regionals.
3. Unique and distinctive robot designs stand out. Our design in 2014 was very different than all other robots at the STL regional, and because of that every other team knew who we were.
4. It's far better to be able to do all robot functions without needing to use the field elements (e.g., walls, boundaries, etc.). For example, we could pick up the ball very quickly, regardless of where we were. In the STL regional, there were a few bots that could only pick up the ball if they pushed it against a wall.
5. Our robot was:

• reliable - it could always do what we said/wanted
• versatile - it could do lots of things very well (e.g., pickup ball, contain ball, pass via "the kiss", push, defend, harass, etc.). Only thing we couldn't do was shoot in the upper goal, and if we'd done that it's very likely we wouldn't have done much else as well as we did. Would have been nice to have a faster (multi-gear) drive train.

Pits

1. Posters in the pit that show robot features. This would make it much easier during judging to make sure we didn't miss anything (like we did in 2014).
2. Take all prototypes to the pit for display. This will help in judging.

Miscellaneous

1. We should take lots of photos and videos of team members, even outside after hours. We can then use these to create more encompassing videos.