Originally Posted by thefro526
Jared has the advantage of knowing how I think, so to him, what he said and what I said, are the same thing.
Without spilling the beans on EXACTLY how to do what I described in post 11, imagine the following.
A Kit Bot, perhaps 32"L x 26"W or somewhere about there, with a single jointed arm. This single jointed arm has a sort of 'bucket' on the end of it that functions exactly like a spatula would when cooking a omelette or a pancake. Let's say this bucket can hold some amount of discs in a lower compartment greater than two. This arm with said bucket is powered by a CIM motor or two and is very light weight. If you were to move this arm upwards at the highest speed possible with gearing and assistance designed to not draw more than 40A or so, what does it become?
A catapult.
Now lets go back to the spatula bucket... When you're cooking an omelette or pancakes, if you hit them just right with the spatula, the omelette or pancake stays still, while the spatula moves under.... So if you drive at two disks pre-placed on the field reasonably quickly, the spatula moves right under them.
Now you use you catapult again.
Since you've got a spatula bucket on the end of your arm, with more than one compartment, you have a place to load 4 colored disks in as well... From here, it's just about climbing.
So you add a mechanism that allows you to retract and hold position, since you can already 'reach' out and up on the pyramid....
I'm fairly sure that this is no super robot.
Efficient analysis of the real challenge is the key to success with limited resources.
Edit-----
I went back and reread the posts from #12-#16 and wanted to add something:
I am more or less trying to show that an ascent to Zone 3 is not an unreasonable task to expect to be done, especially if you take in to consideration that some teams may decide to spend the better portion of the match doing so. I took this idea one step further in an attempt to validate this school of thought, showing that a robot that had been based around an ascent to zone three can actually be an upper mid tier robot with some creative thinking and a little bit of extra work.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the arms race, the quest to figure out what the Captain of the world champion alliance is going to do, that we forget about what their second pick will do, the 24th team in the draft of that division who is often the robot that can either push an alliance to the top, or drag it to the very bottom. The majority of the discussion I have seen so far focuses on hanging quickly, purely at the end game. Odds are, the captain of the world champion alliance will do this, much in the same way that champions of the past, but it isn't a requirement for every team to be successful at a reasonably high level.
I just hope some team out there sees what I've said and it 'clicks'. Odds are, if you focus on the Zone 3 ascent, and are $@#$@#$@#$@# good at it, you'll be ahead of more than half of the pack. If you can do the ascent and a few tricks while on the way up, you'll definitely be a force wherever you go - might not win all of the matches, but I can assure you that many of those that you win could not have been won without you.
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