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Unread 08-04-2010, 00:46
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Ed Law Ed Law is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Rookie Year: 2009
Location: Foster City, CA, USA
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Re: Sacrificing a State Championship for the Cause???

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wayne TenBrink View Post
When it looked like we would seed #1 we started talking to 469, and our scouts got together to compare notes. Having 469 as a partner completely changed what we were looking for in a third partner. While most teams were looking for defense, 1918 was going to play center zone support and we needed a front zone striker. That is probably why 2834 was still around.
What I am going to say deviates from the original post but I wanted to reply to something Wayne said. I want to explain why we designed our robot that way.

Some time in Week 2 or 3, after some discussions with Jim Zondag from Team 33 who mentors us, I came to the conclusion that the great teams will want to play midfield or start in far zone to kick the 3 balls and move to midfield. My predictions were correct. This is similar to real soccer where if you dominate the midfield, you will most likely win.

My philosophy for our young team at this point is to design a robot to be the best supporting robot and not try to do everything. We wanted to help our alliance partners win matches. This worked really well last year when we concentrated on delivering empty cells. We were able to make a difference in many matches and helped our alliance partners win. It worked so well that we were alliance captain #8 at the State Championship. However we realized that we were lacking a critical component which is to collect balls so we put it in with Team 33's help during offseason before going to MARC.

This year, in order to try to get picked in the elimination round, I decided to design a robot to play striker in the near zone to support the good robots playing midfield. I designed the kicking angle to kick low and not try to clear a long distance. I put in soft kick for very near shots and regular kick for further out. We concentrated on ball control to quickly acquire balls. We also realized early on that there is no shame in pushing balls in when you can push 2 or 3 at a time at close to 100% accuracy. That is why we can score 8 balls a match. Our robot can actually go to midfield and score from there. We did that quite a few times when our partners were not able to feed us balls. Most teams probably didn't know this about us unless they have very detail match scouting data.

During alliance selection, we were passed up by all the teams, partly because we were ranked very low and partly because they were looking for defensive robots. Throughout district events and qualifying at States, we never played defense in the far zone so teams could not tell what we can do. When the alliance selection got down to #15 pick and Team 67 and 217 picked 2612, I thought we should just pack up. I thought I made the wrong decision to design the robot to play near zone. Fortunately the combination of 1918 and 469 needed a near zone striker and we were the best robot other than 910 (from scouting statistics) for that role.

We did contribute to the alliance. I posted the videos on vimeo and you can count how many balls we cleaned up including the winning shot in match 4 of the finals as time expires. Despite one team calling us nothing more than a pushing cart, we can actually shoot from far away if we need to.
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