Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

The landfill totes are in the same location every time. A driver can drill over and over and over again on getting these totes to the point where it can become almost automatic. Don't bet on the human load to be consistently faster.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

It's really a debatable matter, and how your robot does the task is what really defines the best strategy. Landfill is such a risky move. Look at the field spacing. If you have 3 robots going to the landfill, it's going to be a tight squeeze. If you have some robots that place stacks on the step closest to the landfill, you could get trapped in and then knock over the stacks. I personally feel that the best strategy would be to have 3 robots, each who can perform one of these 3 tasks:
-One robot taking totes from the landfill, and making large stacks of 4-6
-Another making stacks from the totes at the HP station
-One robot taking RC to the HP station, getting a noodle in them, and stacking them

That would essentially be the ideal alliance. I'm hoping to compose a strategy book, detailing our possible match paths to best cooperate with your alliance members and ensure that you won't be in their way.

Your worst enemy this year will be your own alliance.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

Most likely, both methods of acquiring totes will be valuable at the higher levels. Using the 2013 game as an example, there were debates about floor pickup of Frisbees vs. feeder station. The winning alliance had one robot that used the feeder station exclusively and had one of the fastest human players, 610, and one robot that used their fast floor pickup a lot, 1477. They made a very effective combination, not competing for resources (feeder station, Frisbees on the floor). A nice twist is that neither were the alliance captains yet scored most of the points for their alliance.

It may be too soon to say that loading from the human player will be slow and problematic. Many teams in 2013 had trouble loading even one Frisbee at the loading station, the Frisbee falling to the ground. Other teams found ways to do it reliably. Others found ways to do it reliably and quickly, loading all 4 in the time it took others to load only one.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

Maybe in Minnesota.

I know for a fact our robot could complete a cycle from grabbing a loose ball to scoring it in 20s. Heck, I saw Bomb Squad acquire, truss to HP, inbound, and score under heavy defense in sub 20 seconds. So, no, it most certainly doesn't take teams that long.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

Bomb Squad isn't most teams. They fall in the "handful of very good teams" he mentioned.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

If it would have taken my driver 10 seconds to acquire a ball last year he would have been fired. Heck if it took more than a couple seconds he would have been fired.

This year without defense he/she will need to be able to line up and acquire within a couple seconds and that's without an active grabber.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

And I would agree with you, but the fact remains that most teams struggle to acquire game pieces quickly.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

Which isn't what I replied to. He said teams took 20 seconds to get objects, which I interpret to mean, "on average it took teams 20 seconds to acquire a single game piece in each of the last 4 years". This statement is completely wrong based on even the weakest events I attended last season (I attended 11 events over the preseason, season, and off season. I think Ed is one of the few people in FRC who saw more events than I did).

My point is, if I assume a reasonable distribution of team skills, placing the average at 20 seconds is horribly wrong. There are certainly teams that took that long or longer, but I wouldn't claim that the average for acquiring game pieces is 20 seconds each.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

I took the "maybe in Minnesota" as an unnecessary shot against our region. Had you said this instead I wouldn't have posted.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

Poster is from a team that has only competed for two years and only once outside of MN. Presumed data set was limited.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

I think that the really good teams will be able to play all three positions, and that good teams will be able to stack from the feeder station and the land fill. I think that one role that alot of people arent thinking of very higly is just a support robot, that cannot stack well or do rc well. I think an ideal third pick would be a robot that can get atleast one to two rc from the landfill in auto, and then be very good at organizing totes for the really good stackers to speed up their ability to get totes.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

While Caleb may have overstated the acquisition time, he may not be as far off as many are claiming. Through weeks 3 last year, the average alliance score was roughly 80 pts. During the match, there were 7 20 second periods last year. We will assume (falsely) that on average no points in auto mode. Scenario 1, 1 team does 8 cycles scoring 10 pts/cycle, and thus it would be 17.5 seconds per cycle. I really only saw this attempted by 1 robot last year during week 1. It was an amazing flurry of activity, but frankly a pretty mediocre score. In this scenario, there was very little time in the act of scoring (couple seconds), and the transition (drive time) was roughly 45 feet which took another 5-6 seconds. Thus the waiting on the HP to run around and load them was around 8 seconds which could arguably be considered acquiring.
Another scenario would be the Pass and high score. This is worth 20 points. This would only be 4 cycles which would be 35 seconds per cycle. Assuming scoring was not much different (a few seconds), then this effort would have about 30 seconds for acquire, transit, pass (another form of acquire) and final transit. If I give 5x2 seconds for transit, that leaves 20 seconds for an acquire and a pass which is arguably an acquire also. This would be 10 seconds on average for both of those actions.

If you run any higher score per cycle scenario, you get a lower cycle count and a higher "acquire" time per cycle relative to these "average" matches. this is also true of any scoring relative to auton. Using The Blue alliance, these average matches and lowering scoring accounted for 44% of matches, and the next bin higher accounts for 57% of matches.

So, while 20 seconds might be high, it isn't a 10x multiplier like many on CD here are claiming. I would argue to many that if you really take a hard look at how long it took your team to run down a loose ball and acquire it, you might be surprised.

Acquisition is often like other scoring. People tend to remember the fastest or best performance and ignore the time they spent 30 seconds trying to dig a ball out from under a bridge, or jostling the robot for 20 seconds trying to get a jammed frisbee free.

I poke mostly at Schreiber on this one as he is the youngest grumpy old man I know:p . He has worked with enough teams of various skill level to remember that a lot of the middle and lower end of FRC has difficulty acquiring and scoring a game piece more than 2 times per match...
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The landfill will be a polar experience this year. For many teams, the blocked together distribution of totes might as well be fort knox as it will be difficult for them to get in and acquire without damaging arms and forklifts. I expect teams will learn skills similar to pool players of either "breaking" the pack to more easily pick them off 1 by 1, or learning which ones to go after first. There will likely be a few of the best teams though that will be amazing at acquiring in the landfill. With the slowness of the HP chute door (yes, chute door), some elite teams will develop landfill mining practices that will be jaw dropping. I suspect at least a couple (and likely not more) that will be able to outpace the chute door significantly. I can't wait to see them play the game.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

I guess I slightly disagree with the the three roles. I think that there will be robots that can score 200 points on there own and see the roles more defined as:
Stacker: makes 5 stacks of 5 or 6 with 3 - 5 with bins.
Bin: Does not actually stack the bins but gathers 2 or more from step and may fill them with litter then puts them directly into stacker.
Landfill pusher: If given the entire match and a full scoring platform a box on wheels with a good driver should be able to score at least 8 totes.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

While MinuteBots might be new, Caleb is a KnightKrawler alum, and has a few more years than that under his belt.

While I'd agree that extrapolating observations from one region to all others is typically an oversimplification, I'd also say that for most teams it's much more useful to be familiar with your area or the area you're competing in that it is to worry about others. It's pretty clear that there's a different average at, say Silicon Valley Regional than there is at MN 10K Lakes Regional. A team travelling to either region would likely have their assumptions about what an average team can or cannot do challenged.

Re: Should You Get Totes From Landfill
 

The thing about level of play at different regionals...yeah, there are big differences. We usually have an upper tier robot at the AZ regional, and the same robot gets lost in the crowd at some other regionals we attend.

I'm expecting a lot of teams to take at least 20 seconds to get a tote and put it on a stack (however their robot does that). The talk of 5-6 capped stacks is mostly fantasy for most of the teams at the regionals we'll be playing.

One related aspect is that we are expecting quite a few teams to design for chute loading, so we want to be good at fast landfill loading. There are only two chutes. The landfill is 27' wide.