Quote:
Originally Posted by Rynocorn
Love the single piston catapult! Looks extremely consistant and effective!
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You may notice that the prototype catapult had a single cylinder, but the robot catapult has two. We tried the second cylinder somewhat on a whim, and were surprised at how performance improved without a huge hit to air consumption.
By performance, I mean a wide range of distances where shots can be made. It's possible to tune the shots for maximum distance, but you can only make shots from very far away (on the down side of the flight trajectory) and very close up (on the up side of the flight trajectory). We tune the throws until those sweet spots touch, giving a wide sweet spot. (Right now, the bagged competition bot has a range of 6-16 feet.) Our goal is to tune the practice bot catapult so we have a wide range, with the top end of that range being the spot where the robot starts in autonomous. Right now, we have a 2 ball auto, if the robot doesn't need to move for the first two shots, we think we can get to three.
To test air capacity, we ran rapid fire drills with human player loading. This meant starting with the robot at the auto position, firing, then running to the human player for hand loading and then back down to fire another shot. We can get to 6 good shots before the air pressure drops to where the 7th shot is low. All seven of those shots are within a 2 minute match.
We always plan to maximize the number of points we can score by ourselves in a match, even if our partners are completely ineffective. So, theoretically, with two partners who can't move (and no defense), our bagged robot match score is:
2 auto high goals, one hot, one not: 15+20=35
mobility points: 5
4 high goals before air runs low: 40
1 after recharging: 10
total unassisted, undefended match score 90 points
Plus, any time spent eluding defenders, or retrieving truss shots, just gives us more time to recharge our pneumatics.
By passing to partners and selectively doing truss shots, we might be able to push that higher. But, missed high goal shots, by us or our partners, will really mess things up in a hurry.