U^2 Tournament Post-Mortem

By Aarav, Krish, Jai, Sol, Tanvi, Alex, Vance, Georgia, and Anuhya

Task: Analyze our performance at the U^2 Tournament

After we advanced to Regionals by winning Inspire 2, we sat down as a team and discussed our performance as a team. Although we advanced, we are not as far as we want, with PPE V3 not built. If we want to advance to State, we need to show up to Regionals with a fully-built V3 that hopefully works. With that being said, here’s an overview of our takeaways as a team, divided into our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats.

Strengths:

• Transfer between outtake and intake worked efficiently
• Strong pit interviews. Were able to engage the judges and cover our main points. Can still be improved
• Virtually no coding during the meet, which is a welcome change
• Implemented a driver checklist by the end, which should help us in the future
• Skyhooks displayed a surpising amount of reliability

Weaknesses:

• Dislodging of drone when we hit obstacles
• Difference in skyhook tensions (ex. Types of rubber bands) (get blue rubber bands!)
• Rushed portfolio(completed mainly during the week before)
• Lack of communication in presentations and a lack of practice
• Talking too fast in the presentation
• New team props did not have prior testing with the robot
• Subpar and inconsistent auton by our standards
• Starting auton/teleop multiple times, messing up field position and driver controls

Opportunities:

• New redesigned robot(PPE V3)
• More Fundraising/Connect/Outreach
• New organizational system in Clickup
• More driver practice
• Banners/Posters/Booth
• Less content in presentations so we can talk slower
• Distributed speaking topics
• More presentation prep(specifically for questions)

Threats:

• Falling behind on blog
• Time management
• Auton
• Not finishing PPE V3 in time

Next Steps

Get to work cutting and assembling PPE V3 and working through any design flaws. Start working on aotnomous teleop navigation in code and adapting to the new chassis. Documentation wise, we need to update both the portfolio and presentation, and work on connecting with local engineering professionals.