As a coach, assuming you have the time, you can turn this into a learning experience with your team. This is a good example of "our coaches don't have all the answers, we learn together". In engineering terms, you are doing what industry calls a "trade study". You come up with a list of possible alternatives, determine the desired characteristics, determine which characteristics are more important, evaluate the alternatives against the characteristics, then make a decision.

To do a comprehensive trade study on this topic, you should include additional alternatives and characteristics (Lithium AA batteries, cost, total energy, etc.). 

By teaching the teams how to logically come up with the answer, you will be providing them with a life-long skill. Learn together.

Bill

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 25, 2014, at 5:44 AM, John Davison <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> As part of our rookie lessons learned for next season, does anyone have thoughts about the pros and cons of using rechargeable vs. regular batteries?  Early on, we found that our robot performance varied quite a bit based on how fresh the batteries were, and we seemed to be burning through lots of regular batteries.  So we switched to rechargeable batteries soon before the competition, but then had to tweak our programming because the output of rechargeable batteries is different from regular batteries!  If we stick with rechargeable batteries for our next robot design, are there any potential problems or downside that others have experienced?
> 
> John Davison
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
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