[MCC] Minimum Comptetivie Concept 2011

[gyroscopeRaptor]

One robot I saw early in last year's build season on CD was a small arm that picked from the feeder station and elevated the tube just a tiny bit, enough to get on the second rack. This and kitbot drive would be my no-minibot MCC.

[Nemo]

Drive + minibot! The real question is what the minimum competitive minibot and deployment look like.

Aside from that, one of the things I thought about last year was how a defensive minibot robot with no tube handling ability could score an ubertube in a very simple way. I think you could do it by mounting this type of a pole on your robot:

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You preload the ubertube on top. In autonomous, you drive forward and then stop abruptly, causing the tube to fall off the slanted front of the pole and onto the scoring pole. Only the bottom row is accessible without extending past the 60" initial height limit. It's only 2 points, but it's an inexpensive 2 points. If that could telescope up to the top row in a simple way, it starts to look pretty good. Minibot + ubertube + defense is a really attractive pick for an alliance captain.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The minibot was the obviously most vital part of the game. But it was quite, quite expensive to prototype and iterate your way to a direct drive minibot with a solid reliable deployer. Every time your prototype blew a motor, $30 down the drain. Yes, you could work on it after ship, but without a robot to look at and to figure out mounting, dimensions, etc., unprepared teams (I.e. those doing the MCC) had an uphill battle. Yet, at the early regional level, just having a semi reliable minibot made you an instantly decent robot. So I'm tempted to say the best "MCC" is a Kitbot on Steroids with a minibot on top of it.

Note - Thank you Ian Curtis for running these numbers...
http://ewcp.org/blog/2011/12/08/aver...-to-your-team/

In 2011 your MCC (I typically use the term MVP for Minimum Viable Product) was a kitbot (on or off steroids) and a minibot system. If you look at the average team they scored just over 10 points. Couple this with 33% of matches not having a single minibot go up and 76.7% of matches didn't have both alliances send a minibot up. Honestly, if you send any minibot up every match you will end up with max points 33% of the time and probably second place the rest of the time. This would have put you well in the top 50% of teams if not higher.

TL;DR - doing something reliably is better than doing something well occasionally.

[kramarczyk]

Originally Posted by IKE

Are there other 12-30 point strategies that would have a higher success ratio if given the same effort?

Is is valid within this conversation to suggest that a MCC team that knows the game rules and can avoid taking 3-4 lane incursion penalties per match is worth a 9-12 delta during alliace selection?

It is often left unstated by others, but we always explicitly list 'take no penalties' as one of our primary strategic concepts. Often the students suggest that penalties are inevitable, but this leads to a good conversation and training effort that requires as much work as a robot subassembly.

[Joe Ross]

In 2011, team 589 had a decent drivetrain, played defense, and had a reliable 4 second minibot. They seeded 4th and 16th in their two regionals and made the eliminations in both.

[mikemat]

Originally Posted by IKE

1503 from 2011 is what I would call design elegance, not a MCC. Elegance can often be as much work as complexity.

I agree, however, my intentions were to recommend something conceptually similar to the 1503 arm. A single joint arm with a pinch-claw on the end. It could be as simple as some pvc and a pneumatic cylinder, or as complex as the 1503 triple-reduced, punched, flanged, and powder-coated am. I already said that I didn't believe the MCC needed an arm, but one would certainly make you a more attractive alliance pick (if only for the auton points). If you needed an arm, I think 179 had the simplest one that i saw in 2011, and if the only thing you wanted was autonomous, you could simplify that arm down to a tube simply pressed into the claw, without the servo-powered grabbers 179 had.

[Chris is me]

To clarify, I meant 5 tubes in a 2 minute no-defense practice session. I recognize scoring a logo a match consistently was very good at the regional level.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Note - Thank you Ian Curtis for running these numbers...
http://ewcp.org/blog/2011/12/08/aver...-to-your-team/

As an aside, note that when I say average in that post I meant mean. So the median robot (which is really what you care about, as at a large event the median robot will be roughly the last robot selected for eliminations) will be less good at scoring than the mean robot. As can be seen in Jim Zondag's data, robot scoring ability has a decidedly positive skew.

tl;dr: The numbers in my blog post above are over-estimates of how many points the median robot scored. And the median is likely what you are aiming for if you wanted to make elims as a 2nd pick at most events.

[JesseK]

I think one point that's been anecdotally eluded to in these two threads (yet not quite outright stated) is that the MCC should be designed for the specific Regional(s) a team will attend.

A Regional with 32 teams is a vastly different competition environment than a Regional with 64 teams (though such a low team count at a non-District event was uncommon this year). Getting good at the one thing that differentiates a MCC-team from the rest of the pack may not matter as much at the 64-team Regional since there could be plenty of teams who can do more than "MCC".

So would the MCC-team's strategy have to change for a small regional versus a large?

[IKE]

A repeatable minibot for 2011 would have been good at Granite State Regional (53 teams with a lot of high quality teams).
http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2011nh

Quarters 1 often give good insight as you have #1 alliance against #8. #1 seeded highest and gets 1st pick. #8 was the quality of the lowest ranked captain and is picking what should be roughly the #16&#17 best robots at an event. since they are the last captain, the teams they are picking can't say no and still compete. Seeing what makes up a #8 alliance is to me a good indicator of what it takes to be a Captain and to get picked at an event. If you watch the quarters at this event, a repeatable mini-bot (as long as it makes it up in scoring time) would have been a good pick.
New Jersey, a 64 team event would seem to confirm the same logic:
http://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2011nj_qf1m1
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At a qualified event like MSC, MAR Championship, World Championship, an MCC will likely run in to more difficulty, but those are distinctly different then the stated goal of playing in Elims at District or regional events.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by IKE

A repeatable minibot for 2011 would have been good at Granite State Regional (53 teams with a lot of high quality teams).
http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2011nh

It was! Our minibot went up the pole 8 times in 10 matches (the two it didn't were when we were pushed away from the pole and one where we never moved due to a sidecar problem). Of those eight launches seven were first place and one was a close second! We had a pretty MCC robot for 2011. It was a kitbot on steriods (6wd plaction wheels with AMshifters) and a single jointed arm with a pinch claw for the low row. We averaged around 2-5 low tubes a match and a minibot all weekend and were the first pick by the 5th seeded alliance. Our low row tubes proved to be quite useful in matches as we were typically the primary scorer for our alliance and beat an effective tube scoring alliance in match 38 by one point!

Our 2011 record can be found here. Notice how the average score for our alliances were around 30 points (excluding match 32 from sidecar problems).

A video of one of our better matches at GSR can be found here!

At the Championship we mainly played defense, tube scoring, and 1s minibot.

[Clinton Bolinger]

MCC = Juggernauts (@Kettering District)

A robot that is designed to be a MCC would be the following:

- KoP Chassis
- Simple Arm that lowers to pickup tubes from the floor
- Full Width Roller Claw

Basically a feeder bot. Many times the first round pick robots would be picked for their scoring ability or their minibot. Many teams would over look robots that could feed tubes well to have a third mediocre scorer or minibot. Also there was a strong correlation between good scorers and good minibots, typically if you had one you had the other.

For the "M" in MCC, I would say that making a good consistent Minibot was a very difficult task for most teams let alone a team that is building a MCC.

-Clinton-