Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
I strongly disagree. By adding the floor pickup the MCC also becomes a reasonable contender for being the middle bot in a 3 bot no truss cycle. Still worth a fair number of points. It's a tactical flexibility that is simple enough to add to be worth it.
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I think it is absolutely worth trying, as a failed mechanism could simply be fixed to the frame and made into what I described. However, I don't believe it's the
minimum competitive concept.
I think the minimum competitive concept is a combination of a tank drive for defense and the simplest possible way to get an assist into a cycle. A "pass back" robot can kiss pass to another robot anywhere on the field, put it in the low goal, or pass back to any human player (remember, you don't have to pass back to the SAME player!). Floor pickup is nice, but not absolutely required to be a quality third-assist robot.
After spending weeks of build season on building the best intake we could, and designing the entire robot around the best pickup prototype (a claw design), I was shocked at just how little we picked up off the floor this year. At the end of one off-season, we lost the ability to actuate our arm downward to do floor pickup. We put up basically the same number of points we did otherwise. Perhaps the only role that really could use a floor pickup is the post-truss finisher (trusses miss sometimes), but you don't need to play every role to be the minimum competitive concept.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Typically floor pickups are considered a nice to have, but with only one game piece they become more important. Oh, HP inbounds bad, or robot is hit and misses getting the ball? Suddenly you're out an assist.
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Any other robot on the alliance can just pass to an HP to give you another chance at assist 3. In my opinion this is easier than chasing the ball twice.