What are some of your thoughts on completely rebuilding a robot before Worlds? Should teams do it or should teams just keep the robot they had during States? I know many people would say that if it was good enough to qualify your team for Worlds, it should be fine. But I also understand those who feel they have to improve the robot to be more competitive when Worlds comes.
And for those who have rebuilt their robot before Worlds in the past, how did it go? Was the rebuild worth it? Or did you guys wish you kept the old States robot? I would like to hear your team’s experience with that.
So, if you are going to rebuild before just build an entirely new bot, don’t deconstruct your old one, if you don’t have the money for this just stick with your old bot, then go to scrimmages with your new bot and see how it preforms. Basically don’t rebuild, just build
Make sure you leave plenty of time for practice with a new robot and to program autonomous. If you don’t - then come back to the old design. Just rebuilding the old design for the second time may improve its performance. Regardless, leave enough time for tuning and practice.
I don’t think a complete rebuild is a good idea because in every instance that I have seen this is that the team who rebuilds a robot always comes across many issues that hold them back and before they know it, worlds is coming around the corner, and they have a half built robot with no code and driver practice. If you really want to rebuild I agree with the other people and build a second robot, if the rebuild does not go to plan you still have a backup robot. I would suggest minor changes to the main robot instead of a full rebuild.
We rebuild, but stick with general concepts that we gained without the season. For example, for the regular season we used a flywheel last year, and for worlds we also rebuilt with a flywheel.
No. Don’t rebuild. Least year for worlds I attempted to do a rebuild and it didn’t work out so well. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing I would suggest sticking with what you have now. Time flies by quickly and chances are that there won’t be enough time for you to completely rebuild and still have time to practice and program.
But it’s up to you. If you think you can do it in time then go for it. Just be aware of all of the possible outcomes.
If you rebuild just make modifications you’re familiar with. Dont change to a new type of bot. Just keep upgrading what’s there. Maybe completely replace the tilter for example. Or the lift.
Unless you can guarantee yourself enough time to practice and perfect your robot, I really don’t recommend rebuilds before Worlds. You’ve just got a hair over a month, which makes things tough.
The best thing to do is a partial rebuild. We plan on rebuilding a tray, but we will build it off of the robot then swap it out with the current one. If it doesn’t work we put the old one back on. We do this and just change the parts that need improvement.
I think that rebuilding for worlds can be good, but only given enough time. We started a couple weeks ago, I definitely wouldn’t suggest starting now
You do not have time to, firstly, build a viable robot , secondly, work out the problems associated with a new robot, and finally, to adjust to the nuances of the robot:s driving characteristics. You also need a good autonomous. I would recommend working with what you have, practicing, and getting a good autonomous. That will probably be more valuable than a new robot.
If you are going to rebuild, you should already be done building. My team is rebuilding, and we started a few weeks ago. I don’t think you have enough time to rebuild and get enough driver practice and scrims in to be able to fix any nuances in the bot you haven’t seen.
We are rebuilding before worlds since we know that our bot can get better and to be competitive is to get better. our old one wouldnt compete with other traybots so it was a must for us.
One of our teams did a rebuild for ITZ and made it to the Round Robin. However, iirc, they built a very similar robot to what they had before, just making improvements on every component.
I believe, they were done with rebuilding very early and had three other teams to scrimmage with several times a week. In all, I think, they spend upward of 600 man*hrs between states and Worlds. For the majority of teams you will be lucky if you can get 400 hrs throughout entire season.
Even if you choose to do a completely different design, you could still learn a lot in the process but, without plenty of field testing to fix all the little kinks, don’t expect it to perform well at Worlds.
Im in the same delima I have a claw bot (8-Bar 3-Cube) and im debating switching to a tray but I ultimately decided not to as it’s to much of a risk to build program and tune a whole new bot
If you are going to rebuild then you need to plan way ahead and follow a strict scheduled. In Itz we actually almost had our worlds bot done before our state championship. We saw some areas of improvement in our states bot and began a rebuild with the hopeful confidence that we would qualify(we did). Having a day by day scheduled really helped us stay on task and have enough time to get 100+ practice hours in. remember a great robot driven poorly can and often will lose to a mediocre bot with great driving and practice.