Hmmm, here at the St. Louis Regional, we broke our claw mecanism. It was held by hinges/bolts. We have slammed the robot into the wall multiple times, once breaking our welded aluminum joint. After this happened, we scrapped the claw and used just the arm to go up and knock balls. There are times when robots create traffic jams, but overall, there seems to be many teams that can only knock balls off. And yes, it is a slower paced game, although a couple teams built for speed (148:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fLf71xlVhE) have been zooming around.
Today, we were paired with a team that had one or two hurdlers, and our whole alliance was of hurders that can hit the ball off. There are actually REALLY good strategies for teams like these. We won two in a row like this... one was 56-42 and the next was 52-18.
ALSO - IMPORTANT RULES! For the teams that 'skimmed' the rules, there is a very important rule many teams seemed to be penalized for. Once your whole robot passes one of the white lines, your robot cannot pass the same white line even one inch. Our first match, we had 2 - 10 point penaltys for this and one 10 point penalty for 'illegal bumpers'. Our bolts broke and they were zip tied, no one said anything during Thursday. Because of this, we couldn't make our second match. So... remember these rules... it cost us 2 losses. First, our penalties were too high, and the second, we lost by 6 points, something we could have easily made up.
And something that goes with the above. During that first match, this happened a lot when i hit the center wall and backed up to correct. The center wall at some angles has a huge glare, you cannot see through it really at all. I had so much trouble knowing how far down I was. Maybe have your robo-coach have some signals, or be able to swap driver and arm side controlers easy to adjust for the glare.
Long post, but these were all the things going through my head. Just venting. GL. If you need more details, jsus ask.