[Petey]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

Ok, Its 3:30 on Thursday. I know its still early, but I am eager. I've got some questions for all you hotshots who are attending a first week regional.

Auto/Human Loader - Which is more popular? Have their been any penalties or problems involved with either?

I'd say they were equally used. Some teams have been more effective at the human station. Gael Force and TJ both enjoyed exceptionally skilled human players, and Gael Force's player repeatedly performed a slick maneuver that had their robot double stacking.

Lots of penalties early on for human players being outside the triangle, though.

Stack High vs. Stack Fast - Which of these seems to be the predominate game plan? Whats the highest stack you have seen? Was there any particular scenarios where a team that could stack high did better or worse in a match? ..Why?

Stack fast. No doubt. The benefits of high volume easily outweigh the benefits of high..um...height.

The most successful strategy revolved around assembling tic-tac-toes from a large amount of tetras. Getting a tic-tac-toe is like getting a strike in bowling: 10 points, plus the combined sum of however many tetras you scored.

Strong/Fast Bots - Has there been any pushing in matches? Has having a tough robot stuck out as something vital to the game? On the contrary, how fast is too fast? From the few practice matches I watched from VCU, it seems teams aren't jetting across the field very quickly.. am I wrong?

Both are important, as always. The later rounds were quite a pushing match. You really need a robot that is strong AND fast.

Autonomous Mode - Have you seen any robot successfully stack a vision tetra in auto mode? If so, on which goal and how long did it take? What are some other big autonomous strategies that don't involve the vision system?

No on the vision tetra at BAE. Even the most advanced robot could rarely stack a preplaced tetra on the center goal during autonomous. Lots of teams knocked over the hanger or did nothing at all.

6 Robots on the field - Do you like it? Too Crowded, too hard to see?

A bit crowded, but doable. Prefer 4, really.

Originally Posted by Eugenia Gabrielov

What happened vs what you planned
How is your planned strategy, such as employing your human player or not, different from what really ended up happening in matches due to added variable of competition?

Everything changed. We went in with an active gripper, a plan to do the vision tetra, storage on our robot, and high hopes. By the end of Thursday, we had a passive gripper (just a pole), no storage, no autonomous, and no hopes.

Robot Damage
What are major issues to watch out for in terms of robot damage? Is ramming an issue? Have arms messed up wiring? What sort of action is the most damaging to your robot? How was significant speed affected this?

Lots of ramming in the later rounds. Watch out for your pneumatic umbilical cords. Buzz was injured in the finals--don't know what happened, but they had to call in backup.

Scores
There were a lot of predictions going around about scores. What do you see as realistic trends?

Highest we saw was 79 to something. Lowest was 3 to 0. On average, I'd expect 25-40 points per team once they get cooking. Never saw much higher than 40--we never saw a score in the fifties or sixties, just two aberrations in the 70's.

--Petey