LogoMotion Learnings from Scrimmages

[Andy A.]

I was at Nashua, NH, hosted by Team 151. Couple things:

Both NH senators were there (I think I saw Sheehen there, but I may have been mistaken), as was the governor. Pretty cool. Oh, yeah, that guy in denim was there as well.

Human players were spamming the field with tubes. I don't know why. The vast majority of them landed on the near side of the field or left the field. Very few made it all the way over. It was surprisingly unnecessary to drive to the loading station, as your opposing alliance had donated tubes to you. Our drivers were happy they didn't have to drive very far, but I still really don't understand the rational for tossing all your tubes to your opponents.

There were a number of successful or very nearly successful autonomous moves. The schedule was very compressed, so I suspect that many teams did not have time to revise the programming at all. I think we'll see some strong auto play this year.

Scoring on the top row was common and surprisingly quick for some teams. Only a few were consistently going for the lower pegs, and didn't appear to be substantially faster for it. A few logos got scored, but the emphasis seemed to be on just getting anything scored. At least one match was won through just plain numbers of tubes hung verse a genuine logo.

The tubes were extraordinarily out of 'spec'. They were inflated on shop air, and expanded much much more then we ever were able to get with a handpump. The squares, in particular, were very distorted and difficult to hold onto in our gripper, which was designed around the 7-8 inch nominal diameter quoted in the manual. I never saw an under inflated tube- they are either at full pressure or totally deflated during the match. Some were so over filled they didn't fit through the feeding slots. At that point it's silly enough that the field staff really needs to address the issue if it's still coming up in regionals.

There was a big pile of dead tubes at the end of the day. No one cause of that, they just got run over, slammed against the walls, ground up by claws etc.

I only saw a handful of minibots, and only one that was really effective. When it worked it won every match hands down. The stumbling block for teams really seems to be deployment.

Defense was very limited. I chalk this up to it being a pre-season affair, but I did see a little happening. It doesn't take much to really slow someone down. The 'safe zones' don't really get most teams much safe haven, because they frequently leave it to realign against the scoring rack. A daring team running defense could really cause some problems, but runs the risk of incurring penalties.

The towers are sensitive. During one match a robot bumped a tower during the last ten seconds, and triggered the pressure plate. No score was award for this, but it could cause some real issues.