Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

Our space for storing a pyramid shrunk between last year and this year. If this year has something that large, we will be scratching our heads as we try to figure out where to store it and practice on it.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

Sure, but that leaves out the corner.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

While true it is something you have to take into consideration while designing your robot. If you can't replicate the field to the level you need, don't make a mechanism that requires perfect field elements. This goes for hard challenges and easy challenges. A lot of teams got burned this past year with passive 10 point climbers that didn't get them off the ground because on some fields there were and inch plus of difference between the low bars on the two pyramids. I will say I am not a fan of it but it happens and you have to deal with it. I remember in 2011 some teams who couldn't deploy their minibots because they followed the only made their deployments go out the "perfect distance" and were 1/4in-1/2in away from the pole.

Our team was fortunate to have a sponsor build us a pyramid however a week before our regional we realized it was off by a lot. This did have an effect on making sure our design worked since our pyramid was now smaller so we couldn't tell if we would violate multiple levels. We analyzed the problems and solved them as best we could without a real pyramid to practice on.

In the end our climber was probably the one that had the most room for error while climbing. We could be off by as much as a foot when we started on level 1 and still make it to the level 3 by adding teflon tape under our hooks so we could slide on the bar. It also only needed one of the two pawls to be hooked on a bar to keep climbing. This wasn't our original design but it worked really well in our favor because the combination of the two meant we could go from shooting to on level one in two seconds.

Looking back we could have gotten away with a basic 2x4 and pipe frame because we were a side climber. One of the reasons we didn't go with a corner climb was how precise our designs had to be in order to get it to work. If the pyramid in our shop or on the field was off it wouldn't work.

You do have a great point of newer teams. It is daunting but even your own team probably had a rough start. Rookies need veteran teams and members to help them out. When 3467 was started we had a really strong mentor base to begin with that included over 15 years of FRC experience among four adults. Several of them were previously involved with team 241 the Pinkerton Astros and I remember coaches and mentors from 241 checking up on us to see how we were doing, sharing ideas, evaluating our design, etc. This support is key even for rookies who might seem to have it all together. Other teams in our area helped us out both before, during, and after our first season and still to this day: 501, 1058, and 1519.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

In terms of gym space, it might as well be a cube. :p

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

I'd like to think about this question in retrospect, long after I tore my hair out trying to come up with solutions in week 4-5.

The game's challenges were distinctly tiered and increasingly difficult. In my opinion, here's the list of tasks this year, from least to most difficult:

• 1 Pt Dump - This was possibly the easiest task FIRST has given teams since 2008's laps. A garbage bin and a lever and you could put points on the board. With non-returnable game pieces and a deceptively easy 2 and 3 point shot, there was not a lot of reason to do this.
• 2 Point Shot - The goal is almost bigger than some of this year's robots. Very few teams could consistently get discs out of their robot but not consistently hit the 2 point goal. This was plenty viable in early regionals but fell out of favor as disc supply became limited.
• Human Loading - Depending on the hopper and robot design this also was not very hard. Doing it well was not universally achieved, but often it was as easy as adding some lexan to a bucket.
• 10 Climb - This was only "hard" because of field tolerances. As long as teams had an adjustable mechanism / mount, hanging was as simple as a pair of pneumatic pistons or a passive system.
• 3 Point Shot - This is probably the first challenging aspect of this design problem, yet it was still quite easy to accomplish. The biggest difficulty was getting shots to fire at a consistent height, which required attentive mechanical design. Other than that, not even speed control was a requirement to repeatably score 3's.
• Floor Pickup - This is where the game starts to get challenging, especially if you tried for a double wide intake. This game piece was harder to pick up than a ball and pickup required extensive prototyping. It's no coincidence that this functionality was where teams who did too much started to choke - a bad floor pickup without a human load solution was the bane of many teams this year. Even teams with good floor pickup could rarely use it to score more quickly than a human load shooter excluding FCSes
• 20 Climb - 20 was nontrivially easier than 30 points as the pyramid was still pretty wide at this level. Still, many of the challenges of thirty point climbing applied here, and the effort to reward ratio was not enough unless teams incorporated the pyramid goal.
• Pyramid Goal - Very hard to hit from the floor, not hard to hit while climbing but obviously climbing had its own set of extreme difficulty.
• 30 Climb - An entire thread could be written on how hard climbing was.

This game was pretty unique in that it was exactly as hard as you decided it should be. In 2012, 2011, 2010 to some extent, everyone had basically the same one or two tasks to complete, and thus difficulty was more constant. In this game, a team building a 10 point hanging human load cycler could have a very smooth build season while a 30 point climbing floor pickup robot was incredibly difficult for even the greatest teams in FRC. Additionally, the easier cycling robot was often *more* competitive than some teams with climbers or floor pickups.

The key to mastering this game, more than any other in recent memory, was to honestly evaluate your team's resources, prototype well, and build within your means. Far more teams aimed too high than too low. The OP's team is an example of this: They ended up fielding a floor / human loading 10 point cycler that was pretty good, but I bet if they had abandoned climbing from the get-go they would have been even better at floor pickup / shooting.

Re: Ultimate Ascent - Most Difficult Ever? Too difficult?
 

I see it as the the game having a wider than normal RANGE of difficulty, not that the game itself was more difficult or too difficult. As FRC grows to a very large population, I think games with many layers of difficulty are beneficial in helping the competiton sort out teams on the basis of engineering achievement. Analogy: Making the outer diameter of the bulls-eye target bigger, and the center bulls-eye smaller, so there is room for more arrows while some still hit the mark.

After quick analysis of the game this year, we were quite struck by the unusually large opportuntiy for autonomous points, without any special skills not already beneficial for the core game. 42 points just laying there in a known location? Hello! Our approach was to focus first on making sure we had an excellent shooter, while always thinking ahead to how we might load it with 2 discs laying side by side on the floor. Striving for this ability would only enhance our teleop skills. As with many challanges, the solution was pretty simple after leaving room for it and giving it enough time to emerge.

Climbing for 30 was not a serious goal until very late in the build, but we had one student who was determined to make it happen, so we struggled to save design space in two narrow margins that might accomodate it if it was solved, which it eventually was.

Tackling a design challenge like this game with many layers of difficulty can seem unreasonably difficult at first. So you start with what you know is essential, with an eye forward to what you hope for, leave space for what might be possible, and then have faith in yourself. They say time heals all wounds. It also solves all problems, if you let it. Break it down, tackle one piece at a time, leave yourself options, trust your future abilities. That's how big difficult stuff gets done.