[Wayne TenBrink]

1918 is looking forward to the 2012 West Michigan District at Grand Valley State University's Allendale Campus. This is a wonderful venue run by some excellent volunteers. There will be a lot of great teams there this year as always. For many, this will be their second (or even 3rd!) event. We expect to see some well developed strategies from the experienced drive teams and de-bugged robots.

We hope to try some teamwork strategies in hybrid. Please let us know if you are capable and interested in joining us in this.

1) Our most successful hybrid routine at Gull Lake involved us moving forward about 3 feet and shooting in the top basket. Our robot feeds from one side and shoots from the other. We have a 30+ inch wide intake roller in our arm/bridge tipper assembly. We let the collector and shooter continue to run after we shoot our original two. If your robot is capable of rolling balls across the floor (by reversing the ball collector, etc.) you could feed us. You would need to be able to roll the balls about 3-5 feet.

2) If you are capable tipping the coopertition bridge in a way that the balls can roll forward unimpeded, they will roll into our robot and be shot.

3) If you collect from one side and shoot from the other, we can feed your robot if you are set up to receive them in autonomous.

There are a lot of robots out there that are mechanically capable of doing these things, but perhaps don't have a hybrid routine currently programmed to do them. Think about it and let us know if you want to work together to try them out at WMD!