My Hopper/Dumper Idea

[AndyBare]

Originally Posted by mikegrundvig

After last year's competitions, I have serious doubts about teams making tons of consistent 3 point shots. If your robot can climb quickly up and down (call it 20 seconds each way for instance) as well as dump into the pyramid top bin and the lowest scoring hole it could look something like this:

Dump two discs in the lowest hole during autonomous, go back and reload with 4 colored discs. Climb the pyramid and dump those discs. Climb back down and hand reload with 4 white discs. Drive to the other side, dump those white discs. Drive back and hand reload the last two colored discs and climb the pyramid and dump them. Match ends. That adds up like this:

6 points (auto from behind the line)
20 points (4 colored)
4 points (4 white)
10 points (2 colored)
30 points (pyramid at the end)

That's a total of 70 points and seems like a reasonable amount of time for each task assuming you have a good climbing mechanism. Even if you have to let other robots in your alliance handle the colored discs, making three runs down field for 12 pts + the 30 pt climb and the 6 pt auto makes for 48 points scored by a single robot.

This would make for a very solid robot that had only three subsystems - drive, dump, and climb. No need to pick discs from the ground and flip them over if needed. No need to have a power-hungry and physically large shooter. In fact, this design could make for a quite small and light robot; which in turn makes climbing easier.

Anyways, just food for thought.

-Mike

Last year used inconsistent foam. This meant that no 2 basketballs were exactly alike. Frisbees are hard, only weights are variable, and 5 grams my seem like a lot, but if you build bot that shoots an average weighted frisbee, lighter ones will hang a little longer, heavier might dip a little faster, but I am certain that 5 grams wont make as big of a difference as inconsistent foam density did with the basketballs. I would even go as far to say you cant judge this game off last year's, because the game pieces are so different. Last year's relied on compression, weight, speed, angle, even foam chunked out of the pieces, this year seems a little simpler in my opinion, frisbees equal weight, spin, and angle speed, they are hard - takes out inconsistancy of messed up pieces. Just saying i think it is entirely possible for consistent 3's. And a little compared to your scoring, it might look like this
16 points shot into high goal (Auto behind line)
12 Points for 4 shots into high goal (do this 4 or 5 times, so about once per 15 seconds, all you have to do is load 4, rapid fire and repeat)
10-30 points for hanging
Once perfected, this strategy could and probably will make anywhere from 74 (worst case scenario) to at least 106 points a bot (awesome scenario) and these scores don't even include shooting onto top of pyramid.