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Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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My team personally is going to be prioritizing balls over gears and gears over climbing. However, I do expect to be able to accomplish everything. Atleast by our 2nd regional ;). However, we will not even be attempting to build a climber until our shooter as well as gear mechanisms are all atleast somewhat working. Karthiks Golden Rules are definitely something which should be taken to heart. I hear he knows a thing or two about FRC. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
Last night, Team 4272 Maverick Boiler Robotics decide we would only be focusing on only two aspects of the game and not all three. As a team, we decided our efforts would be best put towards two high quality (relative to our past) systems rather than three below average systems.
I'm not bashing on teams that try all three, it's just our team did not think WE could do it and do it well. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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Personally, I've always found the FRC tendency to value the learning experience of attempting more "elite" bots versus the experience from building simpler ones to be ridiculously elitist. It's also a culture that generates a lot of common learning gaps like this. I admit we tend to overcompensate in an attempt to get some teams to reassess. I do believe this is a year on which more robots than some other years can do all functions (certainly more than full-color, 30 point climb, floor pickup of 2013), but that doesn't mean everyone who might be able to automatically should. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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You seem to be setting up a pretty harsh binary set of options here - either building a box on wheels or going way outside a team's comfort zone. My experience has been that my students seem to get the most learning and inspiration from doing something just a little bit outside of their comfort zone, but still within their reach if they push for it. Up until about 2013, 1257 was a shoot for the stars sort of team. Every year, the goal was to do everything. Every year, that goal led to chaos. Students bit off way more than they could chew, and that turned into frustration, which turned into anger, which turned into burnout. By the end of build season, nobody wanted to be around anybody else on the team. Nothing much happened in the offseason, because nobody wanted to be there. We were a terrible team - not just in terms of competitive performance, but even in terms of being a group of people who worked together. In 2014, we started to listen to some of the mentors you're referring to as sounding elitist. We realized that we weren't ready to build an Einstein bot - we needed to focus on being able to build a robot that worked at all. We simplified, and we didn't try to do everything. We weren't a captain, or even a first pick, but we got picked. Given our team's recent history at the time, that was a big deal to us. The students had a much better experience on the team when they weren't overwhelmed by trying to reach too far out of their comfort zone, and they learned a lot more when the robot was simple enough that more of the team could understand what was going on and work on it. Our goal since then has not been to build outside our reach, but to expand our reach a bit each year. If the KOP chassis starts to become trivial, we can modify it. If modified KOP chassis becomes trivial, we can try designing a custom chassis, starting with one in the off-season. If we know that we can absolutely, without a doubt, get one task done well, we can try for two. Also, please keep in mind that for some teams, a basic box-bot truly is a challenge. I see multiple teams every year that struggle simply to have a legal robot that they can drive around the field. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
I don't know what my team's doing yet but I do wish everyone attempting to do all three good luck! It seems like a lot to handle.
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Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
As a mentor for my team we have an effective strategy for picking up gears, grabbing fuel from either the feeder station or floor, and climbing. Implementing those within our design and ensuring that we are above average on all of those is our best game plan. We will see how it works.
"The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks." -Mark Zuckerburg |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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I'll be interested to see what everyone does. I'm betting the strongest alliance will be formed by the best fuel bot and the best gear bot, with the 3rd pick being a competent drive train able to play defense, reliably dump fuel in the low goal and/or occasionally hang gears. Bonus points if the 3rd bot has 8-15 lbs available for a cheesecaked rope solution (if that's even legal this year). |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
45% of people who responded to this and the other poll (Gears vs Balls) are implying that it's better to be mediocre at everything rather than great at a few things. :confused:
(edit) - hint hint - passive gear mechanisms alone do not make a robot 'great' at gears. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
As a mentor I believe that a team should prototype all the possibilities.
Team 5920 will be prototyping and test all the possibilities that is the way the students will learn. Maybe some mechanisms may not end up on the robot but you just may find the perfect balance to include all. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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Just because you "can" accomplish a task doesn't mean you will be good at a task. More to the point, the lack of concern for design optimization troubles me greatly. Let's take fuel scoring as an example. Being high top level fuel scoring robot likely means taking steps in your design to optimize for ball storage. The more additional mechanisms you add to your robot, the less space you have available to store fuel. This is a simple and objective truth. You're directly compromising your fuel storage ability by adding additional systems. Similar examples can also apply to intake geometry and placement, drivetrain dimensioning, sizing choices, etc. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
Maybe I see things a bit differently...but I look at three different scoring methods, with three different levels of reward, difficulty, and effort to make the mechanism. One of them has what I consider to be a very high effort to make a very effective mechanism, the other two will take a medium effort to make. Our team is going for the two relatively easy scoring methods, and doing our best to ignore the really difficult one (even though it is obviously the most fun).
Should be an interesting build season. I was also thinking back over the past several games, and noticed that lately there have been games that require added mechanisms to accomplish the end game, where if you go back several years, that was not the case. FRC robot design is getting more challenging. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
People talk a good game about recommending that other teams leave out a core game function.
If you're a team that's good enough to consistently seed as an alliance captain, then sure, it's more convenient for you to draw qualifier round allies and 2nd round picks that are capable of doing one function really well. But those allies aren't necessarily doing themselves any favors (competitively speaking) by capping their abilities at a scoring level that's too low to win a regional except as a lottery winner 2nd round pick. I'm not trying to disparage the value of those 2nd round teams, but I do say that banking on being that team is a low probability proposition. I'd only want to go that route if my team's resources were low enough to rule out any reasonable possibility of building the everything bot and seeding high. The scoring math is depressing to look at for robots that are missing one of the key elements. It comes down to team resources. It makes sense for lower resource teams to pick something and stick to it. This isn't a year when I'd advise a middle resource team to skip out on part of the game, and that's due to the nature of the game scoring. |
Re: Will Your Robot Be High Goaling, Scoring Gears, AND Climbing?
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The advice given, to not be a jack of all trades, isn't the top teams trying to talk down to middle teams to get better second picks. It's not only a good idea because you're a better 16th selection that way; you'll be a more effective robot overall and quite possibly a captain or first pick. The advice is gets middle ground teams to win events. Depending on your team, the event, the task, and how good you're at it, you can definitely seed first without doing all of the game tasks this year. |
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