2012 Match Initial Observations

[Hebrew]

I was not at the scrimmage posted by the OP, but I was at a meet in Eagan, Minnesota and here are my responses to the questions from what I have seen:

What strategies seem to be effective? Ineffective? This team used a little bridge like thing to just let a ball roll in to the hoop, I am not sure if it was at all legal but it was excellent in teleop mode, and their autonomous mode only needs a little tweaking. The other excellent robot was the Green Machine's robot, they were fairly accurate at shooting.

What robot design(s) seem to do well? The smaller designs worked best, a robot at our scrimmage kept flipping over from being too complex and tall.

Where on the field do robots tend to congregate? Usually at the key or the bridges.

Do robots cross the field often? During the whole meet our 'scouts' only saw one robot cross the field. It was our robot when I was driving it (we had 4 people drive, only 4 tests during the whole day due to pneumatic issues and wheel issues) when I crossed the field I basically bumped into the robots a bit (it was a 2 v 2 match). Two of our wheels had electric tape on so we couldn't push after contact, just right when we made contact.

Where do the balls seem to appear? Disappear? We had A LOT of balls go under bridges. Our first driver had an issue, along with myself at the end when I attempted to balance.

What hoops tend to have the most scoring? The top hoop was the most scored from what I could see.

Offense/Defense reactions? Our scrimmage at Eagan was basically ALL offense besides our robot, though we saw only 1 match with defensive action since our pistons got busted in the middle of the match due to operation issues. Some of the designs amaze me. Our robot is on the lighter side (75 pounds with battery) and our two drivers who managed to get on the bridge found it very easy to balance. The negative part is it is next to impossible to balance with another robot since they are much heavier than ours.

This is our team's rookie season by the way.

[mwtidd]

Getting the 4 balls off the coopertition bridge is huge.

Also its easier to balance 2 robots than one.

[JABot67]

I have some questions.

How many teams effectively used camera tracking to line themselves up for shots? How well did they do this? Did all of the best teams use vision?

Also, looking at the hybrid modes for the final match video someone posted, it looks like none of the robots used active vision targeting to line themselves up before shooting. Is it easy to line up the robots perfectly before the match so no camera correction needs to be done?

[jvriezen]

Originally Posted by Hebrew

Our robot is on the lighter side (75 pounds with battery) and our two drivers who managed to get on the bridge found it very easy to balance. The negative part is it is next to impossible to balance with another robot since they are much heavier than ours.

This is our team's rookie season by the way.

I would politely suggest finding a way to strap some barbell weights onto your robot to get much closer to 120lbs.

[Bill_B]

Originally Posted by Hebrew

This is our team's rookie season by the way.

What team is that? Your profile doesn't mention your team number.