Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

I believe that great alliances are built by great teams and great people, not by great robots.

One of the reasons I still believe in pit scouting is to gage the honesty and integrity of a team and it’s understanding of their own capabilities and the game strategies.

Also, having an understanding of their mechanical setup gives me an idea as to their robots compatibility with our robot.

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

Yes, yes, fair enough. Pit scouting is useless as a method of determining robot functionality, though.

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

Isn't it if the robot is not moving you cannot scout how well it performs. Pit Scouting is for a different category of information that may or may not influence your alliance picks depending on what kind of person you are.

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

we took our full logo post time down to 1:15 when we threw the tubes to the robot, which we can get to the safe zone about 95% of the time.

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

We can Pick up from the floor as well as the feeder, but from our practice, we have found that we are much faster at getting the tubes from the feeder and scoring because the HP is able to positon and push the tube (scoring is much easier when your claw can grab the corner of the tube from the HP as it will not be in the way of the peg).

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

Our team designed the grabber specifically to pick up tubes off of the ground, rather than from the feeder station.

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

Currently yes, but untested with bumpers (we've already figured out how we will with bumpers on)

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

Best response by a team captain in 6 years of pit scouting:

"What's autonomous mode?" :o

Not to mention, it's always fun to see everyone's robots. We often hung pictures of things we liked on our wall while brainstorming mechanisms in later years.

For example, after chopping away about 1/4 of our robot in our rookie year weight crunch, we were super impressed by 40's foresight of drilling holes in everything before assembling the robot. So, we did the same thing the following year.

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

Nice to see that all the dire floor pickup predictions were wrong. Congratulations to team 179 on dominating the FL regional without floor pickup, and without a roller claw (another dire prediction that was without merit). I hope to see more great robots without floor pickup do well in the weeks to come!

Re: Poll: Picking up tubes
 

I would say picking up from the floor is a must, even if you don't use it often. If you played a strategy that involved tube starvation of one or two specific game pieces, if you had two offensive robots you could 'easily' score two logos while crippling your opponent.

Especially with a robot like 177's, where the difference between picking up from the floor and the feeder a matter of a couple of seconds, there is a case to be made for a tube starvation strategy.

Human players can throw in as many squares and triangles as they like, and hold on to the circles (I chose circle because most often circle is the one team's like to put over an ubertube). Then you would limit the number of circles to the opposition supply. If a defence bot and an offence bot concentrate on pinching circles from the opposition, you could effectively stop the other team from completing logos easily. And if there are no circles in play, get your quickest robot to go to the feeder and finish the logo, while the other offence bot sets up the logos.

Just a thought that I'm sure other people have previously thought of/expressed.