Quote:
Originally Posted by Monochron
Do you think a world class team would need focus their whole robot on gears to do a 3 gear auto?
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Yes. The only real point of reference we have for this type of auto is
233's 3 tube auto from 2011. We'll say that the slight decrease in distance travelled is roughly cancelled out by the increased pickup difficulty and the need to complete the task in time for the pilots to act on it, so a robot doing a 3 gear auto needs to be about as "optimal" for the task as 233's machine was.
In 2011, 233 posted this video, never pulled off the feat in competition in large part because competent single-tube autos were common enough that it was rarely even attempted, and no other team came even close to achieving this, with most two tube autos being buzzer beaters for the 2nd tube. 233 was so much faster than everyone else because of a feature somewhat unique to their robot that year, the ability to pick up from the reverse side of the bot, and score on the other. In fact, they actually gain significant reach due to their arm length on the pickup, greatly reducing the distance the robot has to travel. It follows that a three gear auto likely has to follow a similar pattern, never turning around, and reducing travel distance of the drivebase by moving the gear forwards within the robot as it moves. Certainly, at minimum, the gear has to be picked up on the back of the robot, and scored on the front, so that the robot doesn't have to execute four precision 180 degree turns. Designing for the gear to pass through the middle of the robot like this provides little or no benefit during teleop, and would seem to make the having even a bare-minimum size fuel hopper nearly impossible.
This is not an equivalent case to the other three gamepiece auto of note, 254 in 2014. Putting a single ball through a high goal was a harder task than placing a single gear this year, and even the best teams in the world missed a non-trivial amount of the time. 254's 2014 robot was probably the most accurate and effective finishing robot in the world that year. Even teams with excellent autonomous modes gladly gave up their balls to put them in 254's robot, and the build style that enabled the three ball auto also provided extremely tangible benefits to 254 throughout the match. Here, every sketch I've come up with that seems like it could possibly achieve this makes me ask "but why give up so much," especially when I consider the relatively low difficulty of a single gear auto, and the number of teams I expect to be achieving this with competency at high levels of play.