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Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
There has been a lot of scattered discussion regarding the pros and cons of having a Gear ground pickup. Now that teams (hopefully) have started finalizing designs and are in the process of building, I'm curious to know how many teams opted to go with a Gear ground pickup, and why?
Given that many teams are designing a "Gearage" which are essentially big boxes that can only eject a Gear when the pilot lifts the spring, how valuable can a Gear ground pickup be? I would call it likely that a majority of teams won't have the ability to eject a Gear without help from a Pilot. I would also call it likely that most Gearages will do a good job of containing Gears, and there will be relatively few Gears on the floor that weren't placed there intentionally. I think a Gear ground pickup does open up some interesting strategic possibilities, but are these worth the resources, time and effort to develop vs. a simple box? |
Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
Since no one out there really cares too much what 1339 is planning (not like tier one teams, at least), I'll go ahead and tell you. We have designed for floor pickup of GEARS on the opposite end of the robot from GEAR placement. We recognized that FUEL would be the primary focus of most top teams, but we wanted to take a different approach that would play to our strengths, and would potentially play a rare or unique role. I don't know if GEARS on the floor will be common or not, but I suspect that low level teams will be focusing on GEARS, and that the drop areas will be when they are loaded and unloaded, potentially cutting off future scoring chances. A reliable and fast floor pickup may end up being a clutch player. We also considered the possibility of a two or three GEAR autonomous, though we know that's remote. Who knows? The game is yet to be played, and floor pickups might be a dark horse.
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That said, climbing is more important than the gear upgrades. |
Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
We're not investing in one for simplicity's sake, but I expect them to be valuable both for helping allies with preload gears (2 gear autons!) and with drops. While I still can't envision teams often dropping gears that are inside their gear funnels, some teams will--at least initially--struggle with loading station lineup. Even if it doesn't happen in many matches, an opponent dropping a gear at their loading station is a massive gift that most alliances won't be able to take advantage of. We'll also see some fumbles at the airship even from passive lifts, for instance with drivers pulling away too soon or gears slowly falling off springs and not landing back in the funnel.
Point being, as some passive frisbee loaders demonstrated in 2013, FRC matches ensure sufficient failure modes even for electromechanically simple mechanisms. It's hard to predict how common they'll be at your particular qual matches, but they're highly valuable to pickups when they do. Good luck to you! EDIT: Ground pickups and their allies (or whoever) may also be able to force fumbles at the airship, hitting robots while they're around the peg to release or have their pilot lift. I still envision these as being difficult to pick up and steal given the sight lines, but I guess could camera work and field traffic strategy may be able to negate that. The ceiling for useful complementary technologies to a gear floor pickup is quite high. |
Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
Each alliance will have 21 gears available (18 from loading station + 3 from autonomous). An alliance would have to drop 10 gears before they would need the floor pickup to finish the airship.
Having seen what method many teams are using for holding gears, I don't expect alliances to drop enough gears to make sacrificing other aspects worth having the ground pickup. It will cost packaging space and build time, things that could be used to make or improve a shooter, climber, hopper, or fuel pickup. Assuming that it's faster than getting a gear from the human player, it also makes an easy target for defense while picking up a gear anywhere other than the loading station. |
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
I think the during quake a robot that can pick up gears off the ground will be fairly valuable due to robots dropping Hera's in bad places. This will become less useful in elims or district champs due to team's refining their holders and deployers and practicing deploying gears for at least 2 comps. The ground pickup may not be needed at all in later elims assuming that the robot with ground pickup can also accept Hera's from the station without having to have them drop out.
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
At low levels gears will be dropped, but it won't be worth the time for a low level robot to attempt to pick up the gears.
At a medium level, gears will be occasionally dropped and an intake might be valuable. At high levels gears will rarely be dropped, and might be valuable to be picked up by high level robots, but it's doubtful. Gear pick ups might be valuable at some lower level regionals that are carried by medium-high teams, but that is the only situation I see them maybe being viable. |
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
We racked our brains on this one, but we couldn't justify the space commitment in our strategy. So we won't go from floor to peg, but we may come up with a way to escort floor gears closer for a partner that can.
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
I wonder how gear pickups will work when the gear is supported by the sea of fuel.....
:) I do expect that we will need to practice clearing dropped gears from in front of the chutes. And lifts. |
Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
I will add that we figured out sufficient geometry to incorporate both a floor GEAR pickup and a FUEL hopper into the robot, though we are forgoing FUEL altogether. My point is that it wouldn't be impossible to do both.
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
I hope to see some ground intakes for gears, combined with an intake for fuel. I think it's very possible and very useful.
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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. |
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:
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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:
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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. |
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Kudos to 1339 for what IMO is a great strategy. |
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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. |
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On Einstein though, I would rather see someone pull off the double hopper auto Chris laid out. |
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! |
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.
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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!" |
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. |
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
Being able to pickup the gears off of the ground is an extra part to a robot that isn't necessary to compete, but it might give that little edge in a unique scenario. My team said from the first day that we must do it for a few reasons.
1) If you have partners that don't have gear manipulators then you can just set a gear on their bumper at the start of the match and have it fall. That saves you one trip to the feeder station if you can just pick it up off of the floor. 2) Early on I anticipate gears dropping every once and a while from robots that haven't quite figured out how to support the gears completely. Being able to pickup off of the floor in this situation might just save you a couple seconds on some cycles. Overall, it isn't super important, but it might be that little extra that distinguishes a good robot from a great robot. Not sure though until competition starts. |
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we will not be doing this, but I hope someone does. it will be a thing of beauty. |
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
I believe one of Karthik's rules is to be able to pick up your most important game piece off the floor. If gears are most important to you for scoring points, then a ground pickup is probably a good idea. There are of course exceptions. (See 2013)
Another thing he will stress teams do is to focus on doing a few things very well instead of a lot of things not so well. Looking at the way 2013 played, I think the value in having a gear pickup will be determined by what ever you do faster. Especially in the scenario where you need to pick one mechanism or the other.(Do one very well vs both not so well.) Unless you can load as fast or faster from the floor, stick with human load. Floor load has the added bonus of being able to potentially grab gears that have fallen or auto gears. But, if it's slower than your design for human load you are now relying on your opponents(or teammate) to make mistakes/be ineffective for your floor pickup design to have an advantage. If they do not make mistakes in a match you are not performing as good as you potentially could have due to slower cycle time. And if they are dropping gears they are already falling behind. So I think that yes, the ground pickup does have value due to potential auto/dropped gears. But if it slow's down your game play outside of those variables it's NOT worth it. |
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Step 1: Put gear feeder station cheesecake onto a defensive robot. Step 2: Make a match strategy around defensive robot that also dumps gears to a place inconvenient for the opposing alliance but very convenient for your alliance. Step 3: Make one of your business team's aspiring lawyers a PILOT. :ahh: |
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Re: Value of a Gear Ground Pickup
Actually this would not be legal per rule G21: Robots may not deliberately use GAME PIECES, e.g. GEARS in an attempt to ease or amplify the challenge associated with other FIELD elements e.g. BOULDERS, HOPPERS, or ROPES.
By deliberately dropping gears in front of the Air Ship you are amplifying the challenge associated with the Air Ship. Sorry this is a really interesting strategy that I had hoped would be viable, but sadly not. |
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