Quote:
Originally Posted by BJC
Assumptions are that one of the primary goals of the MCC is to play in elims (not necessarily win on Einstein), and your team has mid-pack to lower fabrication resources.
Please list your assumptions, strategy to seed high, estimate of a winning score, and what robot design elements would achieve this score.[/i]
I'll toss my two cents in later.
Cheers, Bryan
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I made this post before reading the others in the thread, because I want to put down some unbiased thoughts. I'll make my comments using my frame of reference right now, because there were some assumptions our team was making early in the season that turned out to be not true.
Initial Assumptions from a mid-tier team point of view:
1. It's unlikely I'll be one of the top 4-5 robots at a given event.
2. Those top robots will be excel at the primary game focus.
3. There are secondary attributes to the game that are crucial to a playoff team.
4. If I can excel at those, I will have a competitive robot that might slip into the top 8, but will definitely be picked.
A 'top' robot will almost always be the finisher - the robot that does the actual scoring. So defining the support roles that need to be played is crucial.
Support roles (in no particular order):
1. Receive the inbound pass securely with little chance of a miss.
2. Perform a quick hand-off, or a quick return to the human player.
3. Be able to pick up quickly from the ground.
4. Have a strong enough shot to be able to truss from most places in the middle zone.
5. Be able to hit your ball in auton every time.
6. Be able to play good defense - some height is helpful.
7. Have a fast/quick drivetrain (not necessarily powerful).
8. Durability
When we were doing our scouting list this year, these were our priorities. Things we saw that made us shy away from teams:
Inbounding: Some teams routinely had the ball bounce out or through their robot. In some cases, if an opponent got between the human player and the inbound robot, the ball couldn't be thrown in. We avoided these.
Hand-off: We put a high priority on robots that could accept the ball and hand it off without turning. It was common for defense to be pounding the inbound robot, and we didn't want a robot that was stuck with a ball because they had to face their intake/output toward the human player up against the wall.
Ground Pick up: We put a low priority on this, because we never wanted to see our ball on the ground. A talented defensive driver could shut down a team once a ball ended up there. Look at what team 27 Rush did to our alliance in the State Championships. However, the team did HAVE to be able to pick up from the ground.
Trussing: Getting the ball over easily with a nice arc from pretty much everywhere was quite important. Almost all our strategies centered on the human player catching the ball. A high arc was a plus. A high-er release point or the event to throw while being defended was very important. We also stayed away from teams that had to lower an intake - they could be defended just by not allowing them to lower that intake.
Auto: You know that by the time you're in the final elim rounds or at champs, missing an auto score is often signing your death warrant. The robot has to nail those shots.
Defense: Defense was a matter of positioning, and that came down to drivetrain speed. Power wasn't all that important - you just had to be quick enough to get between your opponent and where they wanted to be. Many robots weren't able to accurately change their shooting locations, and that meant a defender could shut them down just by parking in the right spot, or by driving back and forth just inside the white line.
That split things up a bit for us: our ideal 2nd robot (inbound and truss) wasn't necessarily our ideal 3rd (inbound and defense). However, if I'm designing a bot I want to be able to truss, so I'm going to design our '2nd' bot.
So, if we were doing a decision matrix for that robot, I think it would look like the one attached, and my "MCC" would be a robot designed around the '3rd pick' column priorities.