Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
Strategically, the designs arrived at by most of the builds were very similar. There was a ton of influence put on shooting into the high goal and ground loading, without much placed on catching, easily catchable truss shots, passing, human loading, the one point goal, defense, or goaltending. Only O-Ryon really differed in this respect, and they're one of the least emulated teams. Unsurprisingly, a vast majority of robots seem to have these same focuses. And many of the varied designs I've seen come from the teams who arrived at different strategy conclusions and then stuck to their guns.
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That might be because several of the people involved in 72-hour builds this year are people I've long considered to be some of the best FRC strategizers. Karthik may not be that inclined when it comes to operating the machinery, but when it comes to picking apart an FRC game to develop the optimal strategy, I can think of only a few people with a similar talent level.
My assumption is simple: They all arrived at similar strategies, because the strategies they arrived at are all reasonably close to the optimum strategy (caveat: at least for a team with limited design/build/test time).
To play Aerial Assist effectively, a team must have a simple, reliable, robust, effective drivetrain. If you can't move, you can't generate ASSISTs.
Next thing you need is to be able to acquire and pass a ball with low-kinetic energy efficiently. With this automatically comes the ability to score low goals, but the primary reason this is the next priority is the ability to minimize the time it takes for you to generate an ASSIST.
Once they can do that, the next logical place to go to earn points is to shoot HIGH GOALs, which automatically comes with the ability to shoot over the TRUSS.
After that, you can worry about CATCHing, and detuning a HIGH GOAL shot to make it easier to CATCH when thrown over the TRUSS instead of into the GOAL.
It should come as no surprise that each of the 72 hour teams prioritized the things an Aerial Assist robot can do in more or less that order.
Back to the original topic? I think 72 hour builds are affecting the landscape, but I think the effect is mostly positive, and it doesn't really stifle design variety THAT much. The best teams will look at the 72 hour builds as a quick benchmark for the kind of robot they need to be able to beat, and weak teams get a working design they can emulate until they gain enough resources to be able to beat it by making their own design from scratch.