Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Thats correct 3158 was not low bar capable but their shooter was really accurate and did cycles pretty fast.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Why do so many top teams end up going low?

1. Powerhouses weren't going to blame the lack of a breach on a random alliance partners getting irrevocably stuck on a defense. They assumed it would happen and wanted to make sure they could still do the other 4. (By themselves if necessary.)
2. Class C defenses are a time suck. In eliminations top alliances are still skipping them, making low bar a faster option if capable.
3. Some of them dreamed of 2 ball autonomous modes. Low bar gave a consistent option for them to design around.
4. They remember what aggressive defense felt like in 2014 and keeping the center of gravity low to avoid being flipped correlated well with the low goal.
5. Parabolic shot trajectories from short robots can still be unblockable from the outerworks given the height restrictions of the defenses.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Alpha Beta is right, with the ability to do "everything" teams do not have to rely on their team mates to make sure they rank high.

But one thing that bugged me in the matches was the fact that low bots were often the ones that got run over by other bots in matches. Teams should take care into consideration of making sure that their robot is robustly built. I've seen robots that have gotten disabled in math due to another robot running them over.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Take my team for example. Going low was the best option. By ensuring you could go through the low bar you always gave yourself an easy entrance and exit to the courtyard. It also meant that our robot would have a low CG making the chance of tipping over much lower. This made it much easier for us to go over other defenses like the moat, wall, and rough terrain. Plus, the low bar is one of the easiest defenses to get through (if you fit), so it helps ensure a quick cycle time.

This also gave us the confidence that our robot could defeat each defense, score, and hang. That way no matter what teams were on our alliance we could easily adapt to perform the needed tasks.

The 15 inch rule allowed us to package our entire ball intake and shooter outside of the frame. This made packaging low much easier.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

319 is a low bar bot, was number one seed (and event winner with 1058 and 6161) at North Shore District.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Now that 2 weeks of competition have played out, I honestly don't see what's so terrifying about the plethora of low bar capable robots. It was the right call for my team, and likely the same for most others who made the decision. As member of #TeamRhinoTreads, it is great to have a defense we can traverse both backward and forward. We used it a whole lot as a way of getting between the courtyard and the neutral zone.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

It's not the shot that will get blocked necessarily--it's the camera sight. Watch for more blockers to proliferate. I think every elim alliance had one at CVR.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

I suppose the terrifying scenario might have been too many robots with poor/no boulder score capability, having sacrificed that to get low bar capability. I did see some robots like that, but not enough to penalize high seed (1 & 2) alliances very much.

Brave little toasters are becoming less common. That is a good thing. :)

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

As did most alliances at GKC, but even a 4'6" vision-blocking blocker wasn't bad if a team had practiced against one. If a blocker were to be a problem, I see no reason that a 15 inch robot couldn't find some a method to, say, see over that blocker. It'd be awfully hard to stop a bot that could always see over and shoot over a defender from the safety of the outer works.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Agreed. Especially if the outerworks shooter is not using camera tracking to line up, a blocker simply decreases line up accuracy and not by very much to an unblockable robot. 498 tried blocking us at AZ North but to no success and took it off in the second finals match.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

118 clearly demonstrated in their reveal video that a lob shot can go in, even with a full size blocker in front of them.

How effective is a shooter that doesn't use vision and/or flashlight to align? That is TBD.

Do you have video of North AZ Finals? I see blue alliance made three high goal shots in F1 and zero in F2. Did 498 shot blocking play a part in that?

-Mike

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Hopefully will have video uploaded by today. The first three shots went in from the outerworks. A critical air leak stopped all balls from going in after that(including all of finals 2). Granted three shots isn't a good data bunch but with just aligning in our practice at the shop(no photon cannon) we seemed to have about an 80% accuracy with not that much practice.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

Understood. Bummer on the air leak! That stinks.

From our experience, manually lining up from OW, especially with tall defenses between you and the robot, is hard to do. And our robot is taller than many when in shooting position, so visibility is less of a concern for us than other designs.

Looking forward to watching the video when its available. Congrats on the finalist finish!

-Mike

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

It's definitely harder on some defenses more than others. Impossible for our robot height to manually align on the drawbridge for example. For AZ North our drivers were only really trained to shoot from defenses 3 and 4. We hope to extend that side to side range for Las Vegas. I do have to give credit for our driver though on how she is able to instinctively compensate on how she should be lined up depending on where she is shooting from. Looking at the robot after aligning with the photon is also a good way to help them practice aligning without it. Overall though our photon has a very large height range so we don't expect to have to manually align that often. Just something we are able to do just in case. For championships, I expect blockers to not be worth the time if it only slightly decreases accuracy. I've been proven wrong before though so we shall see.

Re: First seed alliance captain: Low Bar or not?
 

That's still solid.

A lot of teams couldn't do 3 shots under defense... You did 3 and could've done more!