Hello
Many teams have recently been stating the time it takes for their robot to de-score a “full” trough as a performance statistic. It is a known fact that 95% of all statistics are misleading :D. Claiming 2 seconds to empty a full trough sounds mighty impressive, but this measure of time taken is perhaps a little meaningless, unless the method of testing it is standardised as to the number of sacks used and their distribution within the trough. After all, saying you de-scored a “full” trough is a bit like saying you have a “long” piece of string.
A definition I found for “full” was “filled to the utmost”. To help out here, the boys thought they would try and “fill” a trough with sacks. They kept layering sacks in, across the full width of one trough, until it looked full, but the trough was behaving like the proverbial bottomless pit. In the end, we ran out of sacks at 106, all of them defined as “scored” and still the trough looked like it could hold more - I am talking capacity wise here, not so sure about structurally, although it was bearing up remarkably well.
Anyway we had one shot at de-scoring this “full” trough and it took 22 seconds, quite a bit longer than the 2 seconds we were targeting. Please note, this was done with our Worlds robot, and not the teaser version from our video (which would be less than 2 seconds :D)
Anyone have a good definition for what constitutes a full trough?
Thanks, Paul
