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-   -   Value of a Gear Ground Pickup (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=154273)

Chris is me 26-01-2017 09:52

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
So, this is probably my big mistake of the year, but I think if your team is capable of it and has the resources to do it, picking up gears off the ground is a competitive advantage.

It has nothing to do with autonomous mode - scoring multiple gears in auton is foolish. Scoring more than 10 balls is both much easier (in that you can repeatably do it without any assistance) and much more rewarding.

It also doesn't have much to do with picking up your own dropped gears. That shouldn't happen - if you're a team good enough to build an elite ground pickup you'll figure out how to score them consistently. If you are the kind of team who constantly drops gears... well... your ground pickup won't likely be good anyway.

The key advantage is that if it's truly a touch it, own it intake, you're going to be able to cycle without stopping and waiting. The human player drops the gear 2 seconds before your robot drives past, your robot flies through and sucks in the gear, and you've shaved a second or two off each cycle.

Additionally, if your partners are able to drop gears, you can be the gear-scoring specialist on an alliance who stays near the pegs placing gears on them while shooting oriented robots spend a greater percentage of their time shooting balls into the high goal.

That said, I don't think it is a big enough advantage to justify doing if you haven't figured out a simple solution. And you should have a human player based backup design ready to bolt on if it doesn't work like you want to. If it's slower than driving into the wall and getting it from the human player, it's a waste.

Eric Scheuing 26-01-2017 10:14

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
We're looking at integrating a gear pickup into our fuel intake. Have some concepts we're toying with now, but it might require a redesign to everything above our chassis :ahh:

Lil' Lavery 26-01-2017 10:29

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris is me (Post 1636571)
It has nothing to do with autonomous mode - scoring multiple gears in auton is foolish. Scoring more than 10 balls is both much easier (in that you can repeatably do it without any assistance) and much more rewarding.

I'm going to stop being coy like I was in the autonomous thread, and lay out exactly why I think you're wrong here. At the highest levels of play, we will see 2-gear autonomous modes. Stop thinking about it in terms of how many points an individual robot can score in autonomous, and start thinking about how you can maximize your alliances' autonomous score.

Let's start with the following assumptions:
*The alliance is composed is two "high functionality" autonomous teams (scoring hopper fuel, scoring multiple gears, or scoring both pre-loaded fuel and pre-loaded gear) and one "average functionality" autonomous team (scoring pre-loaded fuel or scoring single gear).
*Time and travel restrictions will it impossible for multiple robots on the same alliance to complete a hopper scoring autonomous with sufficient time to process scored fuel
*Time and travel restrictions will make it impossible for the same team to score BOTH it's pre-loaded gear AND the hopper fuel
*It's not possible for the same robot to place 3 gears on a lift with sufficient time to start 2 rotors before the end of autonomous

Based on those four assumptions, the highest scoring combination of three routines would be as follows:
Robot A - Drops pre-loaded gear, loads from hopper, scores in high efficiency goal
Robot B - Places pre-loaded gear on lift, picks up Robot A's gear, places Robot A's gear on lift
Robot C- Places pre-loaded gear on lift

The 20 bonus points from starting an additional rotor in autonomous is worth twice as many points as either Robot B or Robot C scoring their pre-loaded fuel in the high efficiency boiler with 100% accuracy. This is precisely why I think we're going to see a handful of alliances at the DCMP/CMP level employ 2-gear autonomous routines.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris is me (Post 1636571)
If you are the kind of team who constantly drops gears... well... your ground pickup won't likely be good anyway.

I also don't think I agree with this.

JesseK 26-01-2017 10:39

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
To make it to the highest levels of play, any gear specialist will need to account for even those 5%-of-the-time scenarios. There are plenty of those 'rare' scenarios, so there is a low likelihood of experiencing the ideal case for every gear in a match. Therefore a gear specialist will need a ground intake to maximize value.

Think about it. It's finals. There's a gear on the ground in next to the HP feeder station. The robot gets fed a gear from the feeder station and inadvertently pushes the gear on the ground a few inches towards its airship during the trip back. BAM - referee raises the flag [G27] Multi-Gear possession. Since it accidentally moved in a strategic manner towards the airship, the question of a YELLOW CARD comes up with the head referee. YMTC.

Still want to ignore gears on the ground as an alliance?

Plus, if you add 900's gear tracking vision system, a 2-gear autonomous is all but guaranteed. :D Not only is a 2-gear auton about the potential for 20 more points, it also saves time - arguably the most valuable resource to high levels of play in any FRC game.

BotDesigner 26-01-2017 10:58

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by mrnoble (Post 1636549)
We are not doing a lot of other things. Low, fast, strong pushing, stable, and focused on quick gears. Climbing as well, but no FUEL. We've often made the mistake of holding on to the dream of doing it all in the first week of designing, but this year we were able to let it go, and be at peace with our limitations. Personally, I'm very glad that we did.

Can you talk to my team? They decided we are going to try to make our robot capable of of performing every task (including defense :]) . So far this season we have only met three times a week, and we start assembling our chassis tomorrow! (Late week 3 is the perfect time to finally start building our world class robot, right?? :yikes: )

Kudos to 1339 for what IMO is a great strategy.

Chris is me 26-01-2017 11:03

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery (Post 1636593)
I'm going to stop being coy like I was in the autonomous thread, and lay out exactly why I think you're wrong here. At the highest levels of play, we will see 2-gear autonomous modes. Stop thinking about it in terms of how many points an individual robot can score in autonomous, and start thinking about how you can maximize your alliances' autonomous score.

Let's start with the following assumptions:
*The alliance is composed is two "high functionality" autonomous teams (scoring hopper fuel, scoring multiple gears, or scoring both pre-loaded fuel and pre-loaded gear) and one "average functionality" autonomous team (scoring pre-loaded fuel or scoring single gear).
*Time and travel restrictions will it impossible for multiple robots on the same alliance to complete a hopper scoring autonomous with sufficient time to process scored fuel
*Time and travel restrictions will make it impossible for the same team to score BOTH it's pre-loaded gear AND the hopper fuel
*It's not possible for the same robot to place 3 gears on a lift with sufficient time to start 2 rotors before the end of autonomous

Based on those four assumptions, the highest scoring combination of three routines would be as follows:
Robot A - Drops pre-loaded gear, loads from hopper, scores in high efficiency goal
Robot B - Places pre-loaded gear on lift, picks up Robot A's gear, places Robot A's gear on lift
Robot C- Places pre-loaded gear on lift

The 20 bonus points from starting an additional rotor in autonomous is worth twice as many points as either Robot B or Robot C scoring their pre-loaded fuel in the high efficiency boiler with 100% accuracy. This is precisely why I think we're going to see a handful of alliances at the DCMP/CMP level employ 2-gear autonomous routines.


I also don't think I agree with this.

I think this is a reasonable argument and strategy, and so I could easily be wrong and it could totally happen. But I think it's still going to be a tough sell, for a few reasons:

The biggest physical challenge is that your robot that is dropping the gear can't be freely moved to wherever the 2-gear auton robot wants it to be. In 2011 or 2014, the robot with the multi-gear auton could place the partner wherever, since that partner wasn't doing much. For this, the partner needs to be in whatever specific area of the field it runs its 60-ball auto from. Maybe every robot running this auton starts in the same specific area, that's totally possible, I'm not really trying for the 60 ball on my team so I haven't given that specific auton much thought. But it's one more problem.

But even from a full alliance perspective it's just not a lot of points for the effort. It's a differential of 20 points + the extra cycling time in teleop. This is certainly not a trivial number of points, and the cycling time totally matters, but it's a lot of effort to justify this bonus.

I think the more likely high level autonomous task for a pair of top tier auton teams is for them to load from both sides of the hopper at the same time. As long as one of them can shoot from that spot, this allows two robots to attempt up to 120 shots on the high goal. Of course, not all of them will go in and not all of them will process at a fast enough rate, but you only need 20 extra balls in autonomous to go in for it to be justified, a 33% accuracy if you get the whole hopper.

I totally could be very wrong, I've called games wrong before and autonomous isn't something my team is specializing in because of our capabilities.

Donut 26-01-2017 11:38

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery (Post 1636593)
I'm going to stop being coy like I was in the autonomous thread, and lay out exactly why I think you're wrong here. At the highest levels of play, we will see 2-gear autonomous modes. Stop thinking about it in terms of how many points an individual robot can score in autonomous, and start thinking about how you can maximize your alliances' autonomous score.

What you laid out is the only reason I think we might see a 2 gear auto occur. If you already have a hopper autonomous robot, and you only really do gears, then you might as well try for 2. You also won't see it at virtually any Regionals/District events, because you're not getting a reliable 1 gear auto from your 3rd pick there.

On Einstein though, I would rather see someone pull off the double hopper auto Chris laid out.

SenorZ 26-01-2017 11:52

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Ground pick-up is like "righting" a flipped tote or bin in 2015. You don't need it, but if you can do it it will save you tons of time driving around.

We tossed around a couple of ideas that didn't seem to work for gear pick up. Then we merged them and found a decent solution. Should be able to collect a fallen gear and gently eject (not launch) it onto the peg.

I recall my rookie year (mentoring) was 2011. And we didn't realize (didn't read the manual) that HPs could throw tubes over the walls. We designed a robot to only get tubes from the feeder station... big OOPS!

Jonathan Norris 26-01-2017 12:01

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Dropped gears around the airship are going to be a disaster, with how low the bumper zone is no one is going to be able to drive over gears. Once we start playing this game gears on the ground around the airship are going to be a big problem when trying to score. If a gear gets dropped on the floor in front of the middle scoring peg it's going to be almost impossible to remove it without some sort of active mechanism. To me that's the best argument for having a gear ground pickup.

s_forbes 26-01-2017 12:47

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
We are planning to be able to pick up gears off of the floor, tacking it onto the long list of other things the robot needs to do.

This year's theme is "It will be neat if it works!"

Robomarfa 26-01-2017 13:28

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
We are in the design/prototype phase of a gearbot. We just decided to cut any fuel capabilities including a 10 ball hopper shooter to focus just on gears.

We think fuel and gears on the field will be a bigger nightmare than originally thought. A gear pickup could be used to clear a load station or airship. This could also save travel time for another gear and deprive opposing alliance of a free ground gear on their side.

That said, a solid defense/offense strategy is to bump a robot at load station right before the gear leaves the chute and then hoping for a dropped gear on your side of the field. In the animal world, it is called Kleptoparasitism, which by the way is the name of my new band, The Kleptoparasites.

mrnoble 26-01-2017 13:33

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Robomarfa (Post 1636669)

That said, a solid defense/offense strategy is to bump a robot at load station right before the gear leaves the chute and then hoping for a dropped gear on your side of the field.

G13. Nnnnope

Robomarfa 26-01-2017 15:09

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by mrnoble (Post 1636675)
G13. Nnnnope

oh yeah, forgot that was a protected zone! oops. that's good to know. so then we just hope a team drops a gear at their retrieval zone.

PayneTrain 26-01-2017 19:04

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by SenorZ (Post 1636630)
I recall my rookie year (mentoring) was 2011. And we didn't realize (didn't read the manual) that HPs could throw tubes over the walls. We designed a robot to only get tubes from the feeder station... big OOPS!

this worked out pretty ok for at least one team

waialua359 26-01-2017 19:19

Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by PayneTrain (Post 1636836)
this worked out pretty ok for at least one team

Actually, that team could pick up from the floor when the tube was near a wall.:)


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