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Originally Posted by Bill Gold
Even more emphasis on drivetrains? I respectfully disagree, Sanddrag. I dislike the idea of, and don’t think you could ever come up with, a game that forces every team or most teams to veer away from the Kit Chassis. If you do this, then what’s the incentive to putting all the money and other resources into providing one? It’s much too valuable for many teams to eliminate from the kit, or to make a game where it couldn’t be adapted to the game.
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Innovation happens each year, whether it’s a new drive system, a new arm, a new conveying system, or whatever. It’s something that occurs on its own because people like me want to try to make something new, and want to improve upon past ideas. Forcing a little innovation is fine, but the idea of making teams develop an entirely new drive system or other mechanism on a whim is overkill.
-Bill
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This year was the first year in a while that you actually had to be good at manipulating something to do well. Guess what industrial robots do, the kind corporations pay big bucks for? They manipulate things. They pick up parts and place them. They move welding heads. They lay composite tape. All of these tasks require picking something up and moving it relative to something else.
This year top robots are placing six or more tetras per match, even if defended against. That means going through the cycle of aquiring a tetra, delivering it to the proper goal, placing it on the goal and aquiring a new tetra at approximately 20 second intervals. That leaves about 5 seconds per task. To do this you have to have a really well designed machine. It means balancing your design so that ALL of these tasks are covered, especially manipulating tetras. This is much more difficult and subtle than building a box on wheels that can just shove things around.
This year's challenge is much more like the tasks we expect robots to do in real life than playing "bumper cars" as Sanddrag seems to prefer. I like it that way.