Quote:
Originally Posted by George Nishimura
They didn't seem to throw any litter, so it seemed like they were gunning for the 254 score. Poetic.
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In one match they just stopped at 254 points and sat waiting for the clock to run down.
254's ramp looked like it used ball bearing rollers. I would have been more impressed if they hadn't totally ignored rule T6. They just had one guy carrying the ramp separately. I guess if the rule doesn't have a penalty it doesn't exist. There was one time that the ramp ended up with its outer end back at the wall. I didn't see if it fell wrong or got pushed. 254 didn't even try to get the totes off it, they just mined the landfill.
Another thing I wondered about was the stack(s) the tether was touching at the end of the match. You can't really see it in the videos. The refs weren't checking if the tether was supporting the totes. Judging from the blue box in the game manual the stack(s) should have been de-scored. They definitely weren't doing that. If they did, it could really hurt 254, as it is tough to control such a long tether.
Still, the Poofs were way ahead of of everyone else. 1678 couldn't do as many stacks and probably messed up more often. 971 had a jamming problem getting totes from the human player. 368 had a lot of trouble with their 3 tote autonomous, although they seemed to get it working in the later matches. They also had problems with mis-fed totes. 846's ramp tended to jam and they had a lot of problems with stacks falling over.
Our own robot (670) amazed me with its reliability. We improved more since the CVR than 254 did, with about 3x the scoring. The only real blemish was when the drive team decided to try to do a six stack with bin instead of our usual five stack in the semifinals and it fell over because it was too heavy. They really should have tried that on the practice field first... We were only fighting over 3rd vs. 4th place anyway. We were too slow to make it into the finals.