Quote:
Originally Posted by platypus
Yes, autonomous is a good thing to have -- after all, it does score points, and when is scoring points a bad thing. The point that I have tried to make is that it doesn't score enough points to be worth the effort that most teams would have to put into it.
|
True. I haven't seen any of the games yet, but right from the beginning I thought autonomous was the least important aspect of this year's game. Yes, you can have that non-spoilable keeper, and if you arrange your ringers properly so that the keeper is in the middle of a row, it gives you a boost of points. But those same points could also be scored in teleoperated mode. I know a ringer could be spoiled, I know you would "waste" 15 seconds of play time without autonomous. But a good fast scorer, especially if it is a spoiler-remover bot, can overcome the lack of autonomous. Teams without a spare robot at home to practice with, and code for, probably made the best investment of time in perfecting their ramps and teleoperated arm operation.
Quote:
|
As a good yardstick for the value of autonomous, compare this year to last year. Last year, the team that won autonomous won the game at least 75% of the time, and that's a conservative estimate.
|
I've heard a variety of statistics and guestimates as to the value of last year's autonomous. Part of the reason the autonomous winner won the game so often is that the way to score points won in both portions of the match was exactly the same. If you could put 10 balls into the air in autonomous, you could also score a lot during teleoperated, assuming you had an effective way of reloading. I also think that teams that use the light to aim during teleoperated had a bigger advantage last year than this, because last year the target stood still. This year you can use the lights to guide you during teleoperated, especially while on the other side of the ramp, but most teams will still have driver control over placing the ringers, not pure programming control.
The value of this year's autonomous is more similar to that in Triple Play. There, we had a truly hard task which gained you very few actual points. If you capped the center goal with the vision tetra, you got points for scoring that tetra plus the two that were given to you on your corner goals. You didn't automatically get any row points - just like this year the keeper by itself is only worth 2 points. It's what you do to augment the autonomous scoring that makes the biggest difference in your final score.