Competition Post-Mortem

By Lin, Jayesh, Darshan, Max, Tycho, Evan, Ethan, Alisa, Trace, and Dylan

Task: Analyze our successes and failures in the previous competition

After a rocky start and finish to our first qualifier yesterday we took today to have fun as a team and look at how we could improve for our next chance.

Reflections

Most of our -Need To Do's- are related to becoming more confident with the various tasks that we'll be doing in the pits and during competition. Since we found out about our dead servo 1-2 days after it died, it's obvious we need to have a more rigorous and regular testing program before matches.

We need to have a pre-flight test program or a short demo that allows the driver, or any member of the team optimally, to test all functions of the robot after the day ends and before the tournament starts. It would be ideal to have a short version of this program to test before each match in the Queue. This would allow us to check if everything is working early on so we have a chance to fix it, or be able to strategize with our alliance if something unexpectedly breaks.

Our pit crew needs to practice repairs. We had a LOT of trouble trying to fix our robot in the various errors we encountered during the competition. During testing, we broke a couple of our tread pieces and luckily we were able to borrow some treads from another team. However, it took nearly an entire match for us to replace a broken servo for our climber, and gettig it re-aligned took eve longer with the robot. We need to bring backups of our major parts in case of a failure like that again

During yesterday's competition we didn't do any autonomous because of our back plate and the lack of testing on the existing code. We feel that we would have had a real shot at the higher awards if we had something in place, even if untested and basic. The Innovate team of judges seemed really impressed by our color-blob detection and robot in general really, but we didn't have a program to tie together our tests. This was a major deciding factor. Our autonomous is always our weak spot in matches, and can play a huge role in setting teams apart