Shooting full court?

[Peyton Yeung]

Last year we designed a robot to shoot full court and it wasn't a smart goal. Although the use of recurve bow limbs allowed our catapult to fire across the full field there was to much variability in shots for them to be accurate.

TL;DR Build within your means and good luck if you wanna shoot full court.

[s_forbes]

Don't forget that Frisbees fly in all kinds of neat ways... be sure to exploit this ability!

[Undertones]

Just saying, FIRST has never chosen a game piece with the advantage of aerodynamics and lift.

[danopia]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

Don't forget that Frisbees fly in all kinds of neat ways... be sure to exploit this ability!

Why do I get the feeling that this type of flight pattern results in less accuracy on the goal?

[ToddF]

When designing your long distance shooter, be sure to chose your disk rotation so that missed shots bounce away from the protected loading zone, rather than toward it.

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by danopia

Why do I get the feeling that this type of flight pattern results in less accuracy on the goal?

Less accurate for sure, but even if you're only making 50% of your shots, that's an un-blockable flightpath if the angles work out like drawn. If you can take each shot in under 2 seconds, 45 shots takes less than 90 seconds. At 50% accuracy it still ends up with 66 points in the high goal, and the rest of the missed shots are there for alliance partners to pick up (if they have a ground pickup). 30 seconds to do a level 2 or 3 climb, and you've added at least 20 points to that. It could be a minimum 86pt strategy. That might not be the highest scoring robot in the competition, but it'd be a heck of an alliance partner to someone with fast ground pickup and an accurate shooter.

Plus if you can get a level 3 climb mechanism and dunk in those 30 seconds, now you're talking 66+50 = 116 pts by yourself. Not too shabby!

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

Don't forget that Frisbees fly in all kinds of neat ways... be sure to exploit this ability!

You remind me of your grandpa

[danopia]

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

Less accurate for sure, but even if you're only making 50% of your shots, that's an un-blockable flightpath if the angles work out like drawn. If you can take each shot in under 2 seconds, 45 shots takes less than 90 seconds.

This sounds like somewhere where we'll have to wait for someone to prototype it and see what the accuracy is first-hand. The ratio of shots in the goal vs. scattered on the floor would be the dealbreaker.

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

Plus if you can get a level 3 climb mechanism and dunk in those 30 seconds, now you're talking 66+50 = 116 pts by yourself. Not too shabby!

I think you'd have alliances fighting over you if you managed to pull this off with a good goal ratio

If you designed for a flight path like this though, wouldn't you need a second shooter that shoots in a normal path for shots from anywhere else? Or can the same turrent throw both? I'm not an Ultimate player, so I don't know much about frisbee technique. I guess you could also fall back to defense if it doesn't work out in a certain field, too.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

No, but we have only had them for 5 days or so and have not begun heavy use of them. Also, I doubt that teams will be able to warp their disks even with heavy testing because you cannot replicate the beating that they will take at a competition.



You are also not a 150 lb robot driving over the top of it.

As Don clarified (Thanks), my question was not "have you warped your disks by shooting them?" Abusing them was the first thing we did, and there's no destruction here. We have indeed over-compressed them, jumped on them, dropped steel bars on them, slammed them between robots and walls, and yes, driven straight over them--and not just with robots. Before you assert that competition conditions can't be simulated, think outside the warehouse a bit ...like, you know, the the driveway. Four times both directions under my car, and it still files like a beaut.

I'm not trying to assert--because that would be speculation--that there is no way these disks could become seriously warped in competition. I am asked how you think it would happen, though.

[8885000]

We are very interested in running the 2013 game simulator you mentioned. Where can we find it???

Originally Posted by ToddF

After some time playing with the simulator, I've concluded that the ideal alliance this year is a dedicated climber and two shooters, one of which can feed directly from the station and the other with great floor pickup.

For the first part of the match, the station feeder just shoots disks downfield. If some of those happen to score, great, but more important is reducing the number of trips to the feeder station to retrieve disks. Last year, good inbounders were able to keep their robots supplied with basketballs, but this year a robot will have to provide that function, at least until the inbounders can throw disks to their robots.

From the simulator, we learned that the real bottleneck to scoring is disk supply. Good scoring robots quickly exhaust the available disks on the floor. Driving to the drivers station to get more is a real time killer, especially if slowed down by any halfhearted attempts at defense.

Think about the problem this way: After teleop, a single robot has 6 disks easily reachable on the floor available for scoring. If limited to getting disks from the feeder station, and generously assuming 5 trips to refill, that is 20 disks more. Any defense that slows down round trips from the feeder station could easily reduce the number of trips to 2 or 3.

For every disk available for scoring, you pay a price for that disk measured in seconds to retrieve it. The highest price you can pay is driving back and forth to get them, and the other alliance can drive the price higher by playing defense. The lowest price you can pay is parking at the feeder station and shooting them downfield. There is an optimum number of disks the inbounding robot would want to shoot downfield. Too many and they will lay on the field un-scored at the end of the match. Too few and the scoring robot(s) will run out and have to go hunting for more.

[vikesrock777]

Originally Posted by 8885000

We are very interested in running the 2013 game simulator you mentioned. Where can we find it???

I would assume he is talking about Catalyst 2013, released by Diamond Bullet Studios. It was one of the pieces of software we got access to in the virtual kit as can be seen on the kit of pars home.
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...c/kit-of-parts
Follow this next link to download the simulation.
http://www.dbsgames.net/

[AhAhPatel]

well, see unlike game pieces in the past, like last year for example, you don't really have to arc a frisbee, which generally fly straight as an arrow. That being said, a robot can only extend to 84" in their own auto zone and when contacting the pyramid, so being that the blue team's feeder station would be in the red team's auto zone, a robot who's goal is solely to shoot full court shots is very un likely as a defensive robot for the red team would have the height advantage even though it may not be touching the blue robot. Not to mention that from the drawings, it appears that the pyramid will essentially block the high and middle goals on the walls, and the only straight shot would be for the low goal directly ahead from the load zone for blue. Having a large margin for error and the fact that you will most likely only be able to score 1 pt. goals will probably deter teams from employing such a strategy. However, I do feel one strategy to be weary of is a team that would solely drive up to the loading station, get the colored frisbees and take 4 of them with them on the pyramid as they climb. basically, i feel a robot aimed solely at climbing is more likely even though it may only be active for the last 30 seconds of the match, it may play defense for the other time remaining. So, long story short, i feel you wouldn't have to worry if you are playing against a team that decides to do that,

[cmrnpizzo14]

I'm sorry, my fault, I did not know how much you guys had tested those disks. I made an assumption, and we all know what that means....

My bad, I figured that like almost every past year using a game piece that had some flex, there would be some inconsistencies among them after a while that would affect gameplay.

My fault again, sorry guys.

[Djur]

Originally Posted by AhAhPatel

Not to mention that from the drawings, it appears that the pyramid will essentially block the high and middle goals on the walls, and the only straight shot would be for the low goal directly ahead from the load zone for blue. Having a large margin for error and the fact that you will most likely only be able to score 1 pt. goals will probably deter teams from employing such a strategy.

Actually, no. I've done the math and there is a straight shot from the feeder zones to the center of the high goal. Everything to the outside of those shots is open -- so shooting from the right zone will be able to hit the high goal, right middle, and the one pointer.

[THE DYNAMO]

I want to see a double bounce shot off of both of the pyramids.