U League Tournament SWOT Analysis

By Anuhya, Aarav, Krish, Tanvi, Jai, Ren, Nalin, and Fernando

Task: Conduct a SWOT Analysis on our Day at U League Tournament

Today, we conducted a SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) dissection of the robot and the team as a whole of our playthrough at the U league Tournament. These analyses allow us to learn what we did well and ensure we continue doing those habits. It shows us where and how we need to improve, and gives us a space to brainstorm how we can solve those issues.

Strengths

Our best strength today was winning Inspire 2, allowing us to advance to regionals. Another strength of our robot was the capabilities to score both specimens and samples using two separate intake systems. This functions as a strength because not only did both intakes work, but no other team had two separate intakes, allowing us to stand out. Another strength is that our robot was much more reliable than it was at meet two showing improvements throughout the season. We also took much better match notes allowing us to look back at them to see exactly what went wrong and the statistics of each match we played.

Weaknesses

A major weakness was that our coder was coding the day of the competition. This made it so that we were not able to play practice matches with future alliance partners, and the coder could not do other things like seeing what to improve for next time. Another weakness is we did not have enough people at pits for the judging panels, and our resources to explain to the judges (digital and printed) needed to be better planned to gain the judges attention. Build wise, the sampler was too big and took up a lot of space, so it could not get into gaps and had a hard time getting samples in the hard-to-reach areas of the submersible. The speciminer was also heavy and difficult to pick up samples with.

Opportunities

One goal that we have is that we want to run complete simulations of every aspect of the tournament from full on matches as well doing dress rehearsals of presentations. We have goals set in place to create pit designs and other promotional material for regionals. To develop our Motivate and Connect performances, we want to have 5 more connect meetings. To strengthen our portfolio, we would like to include more data and video footage in our presentation.We also have decided to improve communication, we will setup a system where we can efficiently signal each other to make sure we all show up for pit interviews.

Specifically code team wise, there are several opportunities and goals we have such as enhancing and adding different types of sensors. We want to find a better latching angle for scoring specimens so there is less stress on the servo. We also want to continue developing our auton, trying to score specimens as well.

For the design and build team, we want to figure out a way to stop samples from getting stuck inside the robot accidently and further innovate subsystems. We also want to see what we can accomplish with LEDs and develop a version of the swerve chassis.

Threats

Our major threat is time. We have a lot to accomplish in only three weeks. We have a major problem of burning out too quickly and feeling apathy leading to a lack of motivation. We also have very limited driver practice under our belt which leads to silly mistakes and fouls during matchplay.

Taking the time to do a deep dive about how the tournament went this past Saturday was very beneficial as it allowed us to reflect on what we can do better and to create a list of goals we want to accomplish. Our SWOT analysis helped us recognize how well we are doing and what steps we need to take to better our team and robot.