The Match-Turnaround Panic Workflow

Symptom: The robot comes off the field with a problem, the next match is minutes away, and three people are talking at once while nobody actually fixes anything.

Root cause: No triage protocol. Panic spends your scarce minutes on the wrong thing. The fix is a rehearsed workflow, not heroics.

The triage workflow:

1. Stabilize first (60 seconds, every time, no exceptions). Swap to a fresh, load-tested battery and reconnect it tightly. A shocking fraction of "the robot is broken" turns out to be a depleted battery. This also buys the rest of the team a baseline to debug against.
2. Reproduce and localize (2–3 min). Ask the drivers exactly what they saw — "it died in endgame" vs "it never moved" point at completely different systems. Power on in the pit and try to reproduce. Pull the Driver Station log from the last match: brownout? Code crash (RioLog stack trace)? Comms drop? Let the evidence pick the subsystem instead of opening everything at once.
3. Decide: fix vs. play degraded (1 min). If you can't safely fix it in the time left, decide what the robot can still do and brief the drive coach. A robot that can only farm FUEL but reliably do it is worth more than a robot you half-fix and that disables on the field. Sometimes the right call is to play a limited role this match and do the real repair after.
4. Fix one thing, then re-verify (remaining time). Change a single suspected cause, then run your pre-match control check and a power-on test. Don't stack three changes; if it works you won't know why, and if it doesn't you've burned the clock.
5. Final checklist before you roll. Battery labeled and secured, bumpers correct color, robot enables on the bench, dashboard connected, controllers zeroed. Same checklist, every match.

Roles prevent chaos. Assign them in advance: one person owns the battery swap, one drives the laptop and reads logs, one does mechanical, the drive coach owns the fix-vs-degrade decision and the queue clock. When everyone knows their lane, a short turnaround is plenty. Teams that win on Saturday aren't the ones that never break — they're the ones who triage calmly and walk a working robot back to the field on time.