It's not hard or expensive to build a robot that travels up stairs. With the tri-star design all you need is 12 small tires, roller chain, and some sprockets. Tank treads are a lot more complicated but still get the job done but you may need a little fancy designing to do figure out how to get the treads to ride up the stairs. Even giant wheels would get the job done like monster trucks riding on the cars. As long as the wheel's center isn't not below the obstacle then it will travel up the stairs. There is another method to travel up and over obstacles but it looks horrendously difficult to explain without a diagram. Stairs may be a little too complicated though how about pot holes.:)

I've heard that WAAAAAAY to many times.... if I've learned one thing through robotics, it's that if someone tries to convince you to do something by telling you it's not that hard, you ALWAYS work to the last minute getting it done.

Meh wheels and tank treads are pretty reliable ways to get up stairs.

MMmmmmm stairs
 

While sitting in Grand rapids at the WMR, I started to make wild predictions for next year.

And I say Stairs.

What a limit to indoor mobile robotics.... We will have to overcome. Any anything with high CGs willbe cool, since people like to watch robots fall over..... ok, not thier makers, but civilians LOVE it.

[quote]Originally posted by EvanG
Perhaps a 4 vs. 2 idea, in which 4 people are on the offense, and 2 on the defense. Half of your 8 games will be on either side.

Hmm, a very intresting idea

I like the outnumbered robot idea, although 6 bots on 1 fiel might be a bit much.
The challenge for the outnumbered alliance/ robot would have to be simple enough tht they would have a decent chance to beat the larger alliance.

Reminds me of those 1 vs 3 games from mario party for nintendo 64

I agree that having a separate offensive and defensive team is an interesting idea, although i think 4 vs. 2 would be too complicated to watch with 6 robots on the field. Maybe a 2 vs. 2 or a 2 vs. 1 depending on the game. This would force teams to play the game as prescribed, and completely eliminate any potential collusion. It mimics baseball in a way, forcing robots to be able to play 2 completely different positions. If this occurred, we may finally see more robots that have parts to switch on and off their robots, much like in the lego league.

While bringing up collusion, I just want to make sure that the people who posted earlier understand that collusion is NOT inherent to the 2 vs. 2 style of gameplay, only the scoring system that has been used the past two years. I do realize to continue that further would be getting off topic, so I will leave it at that.

You keep saying "change the alliance setup," but i'm suprised no one's ever thought about a 1 on 3 game.

Mabye like this: one end of the feild is the scoring zone for the one robot and the others have to stop it from getting there. have some special terrain of sorts (Make it so the lone robot can have 4+ ways of getting up to the scoring sone (stairs, etc.)). Add in some other ways of scoring, mabye moving a large cube onto one end of the feild or something. The team of 3 get the number of second it took the other robot to sit fully on the end for a score, and have the one robot get 120 - his time in secs. for a score and voila. game=designed.

It's be interesting because one match you may be a defender, and next time, you could be on the offense.

Finals with that would be a little odd, though.

Sorry, I'm just rambling a bit.

The only changes that need to be made is that FIRST needs to take 20-50 FIRST vets and have them sit in a room to discuss a game plan that FIRST proposes.

This years game was great. It involved programming/electronics more yet still required the drive team to do a lot.

However, the problem was that the effects the game rules would have on robot design were not carefully thought out. Being on top was worth too much and we found out that destruction is easier than creation.

By not going through these 'little' things, the game turned into a brawl more often than an elegant match of stacking. Though the game is entitled stack attack, the whole section in the rules about stacks was almost not needed at all because the other sections clearly showed to certain designers that winning didn't require stacking.

My proposal stands that FIRST makes an elegant game. Then they get veterans of the game, engineers, etc to discuss for an extended (perhaps 1-2 weeks) the effects on design and game outcome if the rules were implemented and how to revise it to make it more balanced.

However, my one change would be 1v1 matches. Then robots are judged by how good they are and not whether the alliance partner can move. This does not seem practical with the 50+ teams at some regionals, but I would trade my 8 qualifying matches for 4 with just our robot against another.

The playing feild has to be very basic and cheap, teams used to complain because fields cost too much and were impossible to be temporary. If you look at the past 4 years the fields have been about the same size, the perimiter railings very similar and the player stations virtually identicle. Having huge features is something avoided, like the hills they had a long time ago. 6 bots a a field would be fun but very crowded. This year looked crowded because the crates took up a good amount of room as well. I really can't see a big vs small aliiance because it would lead to enourmous damage to bots. The defender would just be a tank, the majority of teams would go modular and remove manipulators and add rams. Plus on a 3 vs 1 match one offenense could just pin the defender and the other 2 offense would have a field day.

The 3 on3 idea would be nice but you can still have some fun with it. What if you could 'tag' the third bot and take your bot out of play and put theres in. This could be as simple as 3 bots on the field for each team, 2 start activated a third is dead, every team is equiped with a 2001esk kill switch, when 1 of the active teams killed there bot the 3rd bot would activate. Or to make it more complex have an area dedicated to this 'tag'. This would give you the benefit of 6 bots but since only 4 could move it would be less 'busy' out there. Also if a bot were to throw a chain, tip over, or otherwise die you would have imediate backup (the reason alliance have always had the extra bot).

I enjoyed the freedome FIRST gave us there in the starting positions and hope its carried to next year. I'm not a fan of humans on the field to start, I prefer the oldschool human plays during the match.

As for fun thing to manipulate, noodles(the foam pool toys) would be great. Maybe road cones.

As for an obstacle, the rollers they have at factories and warehouses to slide boxes on. The passive ones not the powered. They would be fairly cheap and depending on there size also mobile. Plus they would be a major challange to get over.

Yeah they would be nice obstacles if you wanted no one to get over them.:D The car industry uses passive rollers to test there cars on without having them move. The robots would be spinning there wheels in vain.

What stairs are cheap especially if your in a two story school. Your bound to find something that resembles staris without having to build them.

Capture the flag with 1/2 the time being autonomous mode!

Few more comments...

About the unbalanced team idea - it seems like something cool, but I don't know if it would work.

2 vs 1 means only 3 'bots per round and at the bigger regionals, that would result in a lot less matches played. Personally, I'd rather have more matches - if we spend 6 hard weeks, I'd want to play with the bot as much as possible.

3 vs 1 I think is the worse. First, it would be a bit TOO unbalanced unless the defending bot had a REALLY big advantage. Then there's the fact that two offensive 'bots could easily pin the lone defending bot, letting the third offensive bot have a field day. There's also the fact that if the defender fails for some reason, not two but THREE teams get to do whatever they want and have pretty much total control over the rest of the match (in the past two years, two teams only got to do what they wanted if two other teams failed). This could lead to some unfair advantages.

3 vs 2 I think is the best compromise on all these issues, except for the fact that it might be a bit crowded. But then again - like it was mentioned before, the field this year only seemed crowded because of all the boxes. I'm not sure what effect the introduction of a 5th bot would have on overall gameplay, but I think this would be the best way. However, the IFI controller would have to be tweaked to allow more than four competition channels (atleast I think it has only four competition channels this year).

Finally, 6 bots or more I think is a bit too many bots on the field at one time.

One also has to consider if, say, it was 3 vs 2, would the size of the final alliances be upped to four?

Long story short, although I like the idea of unbalanced alliances as something new, well, I thought this year's game would be something fun, but if we would have thought hard about it, we would have realized it was nothing more than a pushing war.
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And about the veterans getting together to discuss the game... part of the balance is the fact that ALL teams find out the rules at the same time. Maybe I misunderstood you, but I wouldn't be a big fan of the more expierienced teams getting even a 1-week's head start on the design just because they're more expierienced (actually, ESPECIALLY because they're more expierienced).

My idea-
A game with four robots but-
there are no official alliances. There are two sections.
Winning section teams get their score multiplied by 1/50 of the opposite section's score. A robot must be in a section for that section to have a score (no 4 on 0)This is cool because you can win by losing and lose by winning(or win by winning and lose by losing). Points would need to be more difficult to undo, this year it was just too easy to descore.

Another thing that would be awesome- you might see three on ones. Or shifting alliances.

That would be... extremely challenging. It would require a much greater focus on sensors and some pretty complex AI. Now, I'd love some (or a lot) of better sensors and the programmer inside of me would love a challenge (although I'd definitely want something better than PBASIC... gah...), but a game such as this would be difficult for a rookie team that doesn't know much about programming. That's why I doubt autonomous would be that long, although it may get more complex to promote sensor use. It will probably still come at the beginning of the game, and can still decide a major part of it.

Also, earlier there was discussion about the big points given to getting the goals or getting on top of the ramp and the relatively few points given to ball manipulation or stacking. I'm pretty sure that this is so because FIRST doesn't want to leave teams out. After all, building a robot is *not* easy. Some teams, rookie and veteran alike, may be short of funds, or time, or mentors, or luck, and the best they can come up with is a box on wheels (still a marvelous accomplishment). FIRST doesn't want to exclude them after they paid upward of $5000 to enter. Hence, a large portion of the points can be accrued by a simple box on wheels, either by pushing goals into position or plowing onto the top of the ramp, so they aren't left out of the experience. It promotes the entrance of rookie teams and gives even them a chance to win.

I think specialized functions could be better promoted if they lower the worth of KotH-type points by a little (15/20 instead of 25). Even if they don't, specialized bots can still get picked as an alliance partner for elimination rounds or win a technical award. And beyond that, remember the goal of FIRST is not just to build robots, but to build people and ideas. Sure, it'd be great to win, but I would still feel awesome if I know my team worked as hard as it could to make something cool. And if you really did that well, I'm betting that you would be recognized at least by the other teams at your regional, if not also by people here on CD.

And now that I've gone sufficiently off topic, I'll be quiet and return you to your regularly scheduled game predictions :) .

at sacramento this year there were only 27 teams. if there were 8 alliances of 4, and there were only 27 teams, the last 5 teams would only have three teams on them.

not that that's BAD, necessarily, but... whatever. haha.