Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
Keepers are valuable people, it's sad so few teams saw that.
|
But all your examples involve robots that are already proficient at scoring. If you can put up enough ringers to make a keeper very valuable, you're probably the calibre of team that has time during the build period to actually do an autonomous mode without sacrificing other elements of the robot. If a team is struggling to make an arm that can do ANYTHING, spending time to work out an autonomous mode is counterproductive.
Plus, keepers are almost exclusively placed on the near side of the rack (or at least, they would be for a basic autonomous mode). For a team that is capable of scoring reliably, this might save them 10 seconds, but they'll need much more than that to score on the opposite side coping with increased defense and decreased visibility.
I think it is less of an active decision to ignore autonomous, and more of a question of effort allocation: If you've got an arm that you can expect to score 4 ringers per match, and even assuming that a keeper will make it 5 per match, the effort to mount all the autonomous sensors, write, and test autonomous mode might be more than the effort required to simply upgrade the arm or arm user interface. Moving from a driver-controlled arm to a PID-controlled arm is probably worth quite a few ringers per match, and might take the same effort as making an autonomous mode (it's also easier to test).
I suppose with a LOT of good scouting information or SOAP-watching you could determine the expected value of a keeper and determine what the real-world expected value of autonomous is. That'd be an interesting project.