Robot Drive Team

By Charlotte, Tycho, Karina, and Evan

Task: Build a solid drive team.

One of the leading problems Iron Reign faces is our ability to allot time to effective driving practice. Driving practice is essential for our success in the robot game, but it is sometimes difficult to find time to practice due to other team members working on various robot improvements. We have created two different drive teams, a main team and a backup team, so that despite who is available at meeting we can always have some kind of drive practice going on. The bulk of the time spent in driving practice is spent practicing putting glyphs in the cryptobox, trying to better our previous time and complete as many columns as we can. We focus on performing and scoring timed runs, and sometimes when our sister team 3734 is available, we scrimmage our robots against each other. Another smaller, yet equally essential, part of drive practice is setting up the robot in the correct orientation for every situation and running our autonomous. It is important that we make all of our mistakes during practice, so that when it is time to compete we run autonomous perfectly every time. The main challenges we face in driving practice is consistency in filling the cryptobox, adjusting to significant robot design changes, and our time management (actually finding the time to get in good practice).

In the future, the drive team is going to meet more often and hold more efficient practices. Our main goal is to significantly decrease the time that it takes to fill the cryptobox, and to accomplish this we will need to clock in many hours so that we are very comfortable in driving the robot. Ideally, any error that might occur during competition will be mechanical errors that are out of the drivers' control. We have improved a lot, but we still have a long way to go.