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Why the low Gear love
I'm seeing a lot of discussions on fuel delivery and scoring.
Some discussion on climbing Very little on delivering gears quickly. More worryingly, I keep seeing a misconception on the VALUE of gears. Given that one gear is given to you, in teleop only, the wrong values are: 1st rotor = 40pts/gear 2nd rotor = 20pts/gear 3rd rotor = 10pts/gear 4th rotor = 6.7pts/gear Many people are forgetting that the 4th rotor is actually: 6.7pts + 1/6 RP in qualifying, also remember that in the high goal 6.7pts take 20fuel In playoffs these gears are 23.3pts each. 40+100pt bonus. That's 70 fuel in the high goal for each gear or 420 fuel just for the 4th rotor. Time in two minutes: worst case (one robot) = 10s/gear best case (three robots) = 40s/gear For all the emphasis everyone puts on fuel as the tiebreaker, not many alliances will get 4 rotors going, even in playoffs. |
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I think fuel will become a particularly attractive scoring option if an alliance can score more than seven gears but fewer than thirteen gears (or who can accomplish the feat of scoring all 13 of their gears). It doesn't make sense to sink time into a scoring objective that won't yield any points*. *edit: assuming that the primary objective is to win the match |
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I doubt we can do 5 or 6 or 7 gears on our own (and in qualifying, on our own is how we figure matches will go). So, the first three gears are worth 80 points in teleop.
Fuel....high goal....that's equivalent to 240 fuel, eh? I love the gears. |
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One thing I think a lot of people overlook is how much the first rotor doesn't matter unless it is done in autonomous. If everyone gets the first rotor free, that means no one really got it free. It artificially raises everyone's score by 40 points. That being said, getting all four rotors will be critical in playoffs because of the huge point swing bonus. If at least two alliances can do that though, it's going to come down to everything else.
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Overall this does not negate the original post. Even the first 6 gears won't be achieved each time, but I feel mostly because of the low priority given to them in the robot design. Most teams so far seem content with just the mail slot approach, and leave the lining up to the driver. Given some focus, gears can be gathered and placed faster than people expect. |
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I think the lack of Gear love comes from the fact that you can literally build a static box and score the Gear. Many teams believe that this box (I like to say Gearage) will be suitably effective when compared with an active mechanism.
I think I might agree... if you build a Gearage and you have 4 plus weeks to practice with it, aren't you going to be better off than a team with a complex active mechanism when they get less time to practice with it? There are techniques and drive maneuvers that we've already experimented with that makes a Gearage much more effective. While I agree that Gears are crazy important, and they're being overlooked by pretty much every low to mid tier team that's attempting Fuel, I disagree that you need an active mechanism to score Gears. I think a simple mechanism plus drive practice trumps a complicated mechanism with less drive practice. That goes for pretty much any aspect of FRC. |
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The 3rd and 4th rotor have pre-populated gears, at least until DCMP and CMP events. So you only need 1 gear for the 1st rotor, 2 gears for the second rotor, 3 for 3rd and 4 for 4th. Since there is the reserve gear that means that you only need to place 9 gears to start all of the rotors spinning and earn the ranking point. If you assume that at least one gear is placed in auto, and the reserve is used as soon as teleop begins the points are as follows. 1st 60 reserve 0 2nd 40 3rd & 4th 0 5th 40 6th-8th 0 9th 40 plus 1 RP Place 2 in auto and it becomes 1st 60 2nd 0 reserve 40 and then it follows the above schedule Place 3 in auto and it becomes 1st 60 2nd 0 3rd 60 reserve 0 4th 0 5th 40 and then it follows the 1st schedule. Which does point out why the gear conumdrum and why placing the 6th may be a waste of time if it is not done early enough to allow for 7th-9th to be placed and rotated before t=1 |
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Separately, I think Ginger is right. It's not often we have a direct scoring facet that is critically important but minimally mechanized. It's not that people won't be running gears. I expect to spend most of my time most matches running gears, but the investment is in practice rather than complexity unless you're at the level when you want one of the best gear pickups in the world (we're not). Think of gear scoring more like drivetrains. Everyone (almost) needs them, they're critically important, but we don't talk about them much. We could make the same arguments about endgames basically every year: "one climb is 50 points, and yet everyone keeps talking about fuel". Or, "climbing is only a couple dozen seconds, and yet everyone talks about it as much as gears". Importance =/= Match Time =/= Mechanization =/= Scoring Potential Quote:
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Re: Why the low Gear love
As for value, it's all about how people envision the competition season will play out. Here is what I imagine are going through the minds of do-it-all teams based upon what I've read and heard*:
*I don't mean to imply any team who thinks these things is right, wrong and/or will have a bad season. Every team has to decide what's best for their team based upon the info they have and their team vision. These are simply a collection of what I've read & heard. I know that no matter what, my team will likely make a shooter for demos. These balls are really fun for kids. |
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Which means a fuel bot with the the simplest gear mechanism that scores 2 gears and 9 low fuel beats you. Auto gear gives you a +20 cushion so a fuelbot has to score 2 gears and 63 high fuel to beat you, but still. A robot with a passive gear mechanism, a successful "drive straight into the lift in front of you" auto and a fuel dumper is probably going to win a surprising amount of quals matches. Even more with a climber, which is looking rather easy. Unless you expect to be a quite efficient gear bot, you ignore fuel at your peril. |
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There does seem to be a lot of peril in this game.
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If your two alliance partners can score a single gear each, then you have to score 4 gears to contribute at all, and 10 gears to contribute more than 40 points. If your alliance partners score 3 gears each (on average) then you need to be able to score 6 gears to contribute at all. I believe that on average, the other two robots on our alliance will be capable of contributing between 1 and 5 gears combined. In matches where they can score no gears, a loss is likely anyway, if they can score 6 or more gears then a win is likely anyway. If we score a single gear in Autonomous, assuming the above is true (1-5 gears from others) then scoring anywhere from 0-7 gears is worth 0 or 40 points. if you can score 7 gears in Teleop then there is a decent chance you are only adding 40 points to your alliance score. If you could add those same points via the high goal then you would have the same odds of winning, but win or lose you would add a ranking point. This is the most interesting game since 2004 when it comes to specializing and team strategy. |
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One way to attempt to overcome the point values that Kevin rightly pointed out is to design a very efficient gears-only bot. A team that can consistently cycle rapidly and get three rotors turning on their own would do alright. This would require a ton of automation and driver practice, but I don't think that the only top-level bots we see will be ball shooters. Someone, somewhere is going to break gears.
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I think that teams that can average 6 gears a match are probably used to winning competitions. 6 gears seems feasible to me in the drivers station nearest the loading stations as you have a clean view of the loading stations and the peg. In the center and Boiler side drivers stations, you have an obstructed, or partially obstructed view of the loading station. Averaging 6 gears per match will be extremely difficult. |
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Anyone consider a three-gear auto? That would be fun
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Would be cool if they allowed human player to still feed a robot though. |
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More likely, I expect the gear specialists are going to get their partners' unused dropped gears in the opening seconds of teleop. If 2 gear specialists are on an alliance I fully expect at least one of them to have crossed far into the neutral zone during autonomous, so one is down field while the other picks up a gear. If autonomous collisions are avoided, the alliance could easily be half way through the 3rd rotor in the opening 10-20 seconds of teleop, and that's just with 2 robots executing it. On that note, this is the first year since 2009 where opposing alliances may legally collide during autonomous. The true coopertition will be coordinating with opponents to make sure robots miss each other :ahh: . |
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Three gears is theoretically possible, given two partners with precariously placed gears on their chassis who move forward in auto. Not likely to happen, but wouldn't it be lovely.
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For example (in elims): 2 bots, 6 gears each: 180 + another 20 pts if another auton bot + additional 100 pts for 4 rotor bonus. Add another 90 pts (40 pts + 50 bonus for 40kpa) for an ideal fuel bot. We end up with 390 pts. Up to 540 with three climbs. Good gearbots that can score 6 gears each + climb make up the majority of the points with this strategy, with the fuel bot bringing the cherry on top. This is an ideal scenario, but it illustrates what a championship alliance may be able to accomplish with good gearing. |
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I'm predicting a lot of teams are putting too much faith in the little hook on the end of the spring. In our testing with the "official" spring (with team stand), if the gear was placed less than half way on the spring, the pilot would have to pull up rather slowly because the spring can deflect a large enough amount to make the gear want to slip off.
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I have to agree with Hill. We received our McMaster spring last nigh and it is not as stiff as I thought it would be. An active mech that pushes the gear in should have no problem. A passive mech that only stets the gear at frame perimeter is very touchy. Pilots, pull smoothly. Placing any further back is risky. If a gear is dropped will doing this makes that station unusable. A team can take the penalty and move it. If they move a second dropped gear is that a yellow card? A third a red card? Gears are not easy. Balls are not easy. This is going to be a wild dynamic game.
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I think one of the things that people overlook is the defense capabilities on the gear. It's only 5 points for a typical foul and 140 points for the last gear. There's going to be incredibly aggressive defense against that last gear, and if you don't manage to place that last gear you have just wasted time on the other 5.
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As teams start the integration process I think many will realize the true difficulty of fuel. These balls aren't small relative to the robot and holding a large amount while still being able to properly index and feed them consistently to a shooter at a high rate of fire is going to be difficult.
I'd bet many teams at this point have prototyped shooters capable of firing 5+ balls per second but haven't spent nearly as much time feeding the balls at that rate. With limited space this year stacking just 10 balls for auton is difficult to package in a "do everything robot" A case study we often looked at on my team was 254's 2013 robot. It was by all accounts a great "do everything" robot, good shooter, good intake and a sweet climber but it's indexing mechanism held it back severely in the upper levels of competition due to its relatively low rate of fire. This was probably a result of limited options in the packaging/integration stage of design. In the end much simpler robots were able to be more competitive. My prediction is a lot of upper middle tier robots will shoot at a high rate of fire with low consistency due to poor feeding which may be fine for teleop but will struggle in auton or shoot 3-8 indexed balls at a high rate of fire and then significantly slow down as un indexed balls feed into the indexing system. Although there will definitely be teams who are all able to overcome this. |
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Unless 4 rotors becomes utterly mundane and easily achievable, gear heavy alliances are going to have to get creative to keep opponents in the dark about just how many gears they have remaining. |
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On the other hand, if you've been planning your systems from the beginning, and have utilized CAD effectively, then it isn't terribly difficult to maintain a large hopper, and set up an effective indexing system. My question becomes, how big of an indexing system will separate great Fuel robots from good and poor Fuel robots. Will the top teams be able to empty their 120 ball hoppers in 12 seconds? Or will they choose to go with shorter bursts of rapid fire shooting (say 20 Fuel in 2 seconds) and just mix Fuel scoring into their typical Gear cycles. |
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Not sure how possible a 120 fuel hopper is. I'd say around 40-50 would be about the max you could store. Inevitably someone will prove me wrong, however.
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Yep, totally practical :) |
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