League Meet 2 Post-Mortem

By Ren, Aarav, Nalin, Fernando, Jai, Krish, Sol, Georgia, Anuhya, and Elias

Task: Analyze our League Meet 2 Performance

After every competition, the team sits down and runs a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on the robot and its performance. Here is a breakdown of everything we learned using the SWOT technique after League Meet 2.

Strengths:

In our conversation, everyone could agree our key strength was the structure of our linear slide. Earlier on we decided to change our linear slides from string to belts. This change so far has proven our slide to be sturdy and effective. It had little to no shake when lifting, which was a key issue in earlier versions. It also extended easily using belts. We are confident in this subsystem's ability to function.

Weaknesses:

One of the main reasons we were not able to properly function our linear slide or beater bar was a weakness that we have had time and time again: Wiring. Even at the last meet and scrimmage, we spent a lot of our practice time rewiring the robot. At this meet the wiring was not properly done which meant our robot could not retrieve samples or properly use the linear slide. Another reason why the arm did not work was because the build was only 90% there. The arm was very wobbly at the point where it was connected to the beater bar every time we tested it. Finally, code only got a few uninterrupted time with the robot to perfect the code for the new version of the beater bar and the new linear slide. Overall, we can fix our weaknesses if we can create a better coordination system and focus ourselves on hard deadlines.

Opportunities:

After our discussion, we talked about the opportunities necessary to take, so we can effectively better our robot. An issue many people noticed was the bearing on the slide motor. These bearings are necessary to hold the belt and insure it does not slip. The current bearings are too small and do not effectively do this job. We believe these bearings need to be thicker or squeezed closer together. Another opportunity we discussed was our next goals for winter break and for League Meet 3. We hope to finish the quick issues this week, to give our coders time to code leading into winter break. We also have dedicated a few members to work on our new chassis and robot design while further improving this one. We hope to implement our swerve summer project into our new robot and have 2 arms by League Meet 3.

Threats:

During our discussion, we talked about how sometimes the team lacks a sense of urgency and how we get sidetracked easily. We reflected upon this threat and tried to figure out ways to fix this problem. We knew that socializing time was important because it helped creative juices to flow, but at the same time it is necessary to focus and make sure stuff gets done. To combat this, we created a specific calendar for specific goals. This will allow us to see exactly what needs to be done and hopefully allow us to have a better sense of urgency.