Corner Climbing, The best strategy of 2013?

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by s_forbes

The face of the pyramid felt much safer, as it's easier to keep the robot in a stable position.

The center is also way easier to line up on. Our team can go from shooting to on the first bar in 2 seconds!

[Wayne TenBrink]

Originally Posted by Bstep

Climbing on the corner gives you three points of contact. Two hooks on the corner rungs or gusset and the lower portion of the robot resting on the corner post. I saw many more robots fall from the face of the pyramid this year than from the corner. That being said, the higher number of robots falling from the face is probably because more teams tried climbing on the face than the corner.

Corner climbing does allow for the "stability" of a 3-point contact. However, there are some inherent problems as well (at least for some of us). The CG of the robot is never directly below the crossbar hooks, so there is always a radial component to the load on the crossbar hooks (moment load on the tower contact points). This makes the attachment inherently unstable. If you don't get a good grip on the crossbar, any subsequent movement of the tower or robot can cause hooks to come loose, rather than settle in. Not a good thing.

[DjScribbles]

Does anyone know the team (with video?) that had a climber with many sets of passive hooks (fold down going over the bar, can't tip back to let go), half were fixed, and half attached to a extending mechanism. They would make short up and down movements to climb the corner, and it was honestly the coolest design I saw this season. I would guess they had 20+ hooks on the bot.

I believe they competed on newton at CMPs.

[Boe]

Originally Posted by DjScribbles

Does anyone know the team (with video?) that had a climber with many sets of passive hooks (fold down going over the bar, can't tip back to let go), half were fixed, and half attached to a extending mechanism. They would make short up and down movements to climb the corner, and it was honestly the coolest design I saw this season. I would guess they had 20+ hooks on the bot.

I believe they competed on newton at CMPs.

that sounds an awful lot like nordic storm 3018
here is a video, first one on the page
http://www.nordicstorm.org/Galleries...7/Default.aspx

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Originally Posted by Cash4587

Sorry what I meant to emphasize was the best climbing strategy of 2013 not overall complete strategy. The only way that it could be considered for an elite strategy is if you had a shooter that could do 3-4 trips or a floor feed as well for auto mode. Sorry for the confusion.

Ok, so then your question boils down to: Assume we're going to climb for 30. Do we want to do it inside or outside?

Strategically, it doesn't matter unless climbing inside for 30 is common. It wasn't this year, but were that to be the case, it would be more valuable to be a corner climber.

[Gregor]

Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0

Ok, so then your question boils down to: Assume we're going to climb for 30. Do we want to do it inside or outside?

Strategically, it doesn't matter unless climbing inside for 30 is common. It wasn't this year, but were that to be the case, it would be more valuable to be a corner climber.

Not true. Many climbers were painstakingly slow. It you're climbing on one of the faces you're in my way as I try and shoot and traverse the field. If you're only a 30 point climber, I'd much prefer it if you climb on the corner.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Gregor

Not true. Many climbers were painstakingly slow. It you're climbing on one of the faces you're in my way as I try and shoot and traverse the field. If you're only a 30 point climber, I'd much prefer it if you climb on the corner.

True but when teams design their robots they need to remember to be flexible. During strategy sessions this year teams looked at us like we had 5 heads when told them we needed the back side of the pyramid to do our 30 point climb and a lot of teams would ask us if we could forgo our climb since it blocked their one and only shooting position. This of course didn't fly with us because we only needed that spot at 30-35 seconds which for most teams we encountered was only enough time for one more cycle. Yes face climbing does take up the most common shooting position this season, but in strategy teams need to be flexible because there is more than just shooting frisbees involved with the game. Shooting from the back of the pyramid is easy but my 15 second climber is also way easier from the back of the pyramid. I'm not going to take on one of the most complicated endgame strategies (corner climbing) so my partners can do another 9-12 point cycle in a match.

Now that we have had more practice we can do the front side which does give us another option but while climbing we will block shooting for a moment.

[Gregor]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

True but when teams design their robots they need to remember to be flexible. During strategy sessions this year teams looked at us like we had 5 heads when told them we needed the back side of the pyramid to do our 30 point climb and a lot of teams would ask us if we could forgo our climb since it blocked their one and only shooting position. This of course didn't fly with us because we only needed that spot at 30-35 seconds which for most teams we encountered was only enough time for one more cycle. Yes face climbing does take up the most common shooting position this season, but in strategy teams need to be flexible because there is more than just shooting frisbees involved with the game. Shooting from the back of the pyramid is easy but my 15 second climber is also way easier from the back of the pyramid. I'm not going to take on one of the most complicated endgame strategies (corner climbing) so my partners can do another 9-12 point cycle in a match.

Now that we have had more practice we can do the front side which does give us another option but while climbing we will block shooting for a moment.

Agreed given your circumstance, but the thread is about the best climbing strategy. If I have two climbers to pick from that are exactly equal in every way (speed, alignment time ect.), I'll pick the corner climb. In theory it was the *best* climbing strategy, too bad it was so difficult. Funny how that works out.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Gregor

Agreed given your circumstance, but the thread is about the best climbing strategy. If I have two climbers to pick from that are exactly equal in every way (speed, alignment time ect.), I'll pick the corner climb. In theory it was the *best* climbing strategy, too bad it was so difficult. Funny how that works out.

Yeah I see where you are coming from. For me I would say the best strategy is the most reliable/fastest one. Sounds weird but I can't say which area of the pyramid I would say is the best. Our team encountered a ton of corner climbers this season and only one climber that climbed up the face like us (254). Out of all of those partners the best we ever got was two of them made it to the 20 point level. Everyone else either got stuck on level 1, barely made level 2, or couldn't even get up.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Gregor

Agreed given your circumstance, but the thread is about the best climbing strategy. If I have two climbers to pick from that are exactly equal in every way (speed, alignment time ect.), I'll pick the corner climb. In theory it was the *best* climbing strategy, too bad it was so difficult. Funny how that works out.

If you have two climbers, and you are NOT a 30 point climber it doesn't matter which one you'd pick. (scarcity of 30 point climbers meant picking one up on the back half the draft was RARE) To me it would come down to reliability. If a corner climber is less stable than a face climber (that's an if, I don't know) I'd take the face climber provided all other variables were equal. More stable means less chance of it falling and breaking.



Disclaimer - yeah yeah 1640 corner climber, back half draft...

[evanperryg]

There are also some other teams (like 71) who climbed from the inside cronder of the pyramid. I didn't get to see them at championships. But, at midwest, it took them only a few seconds to align and the climb took about 15-20 seconds.

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

...we needed the back side of the pyramid to do our 30 point climb ... it blocked their one and only shooting position.

How does this work? With the climber I assume the it's just viewing angle that changes.

Also, for the shooters, it's surprising to me that they'd have only one shooting position on the whole field. Was it just that the drivers that weren't confident that they could line up right from elsewhere? It seems like you could always just drive closer to the 2 pt. goals unless it was confusing a vision-based aiming system.

Originally Posted by Gregor

Not true. Many climbers were painstakingly slow. It you're climbing on one of the faces you're in my way as I try and shoot and traverse the field. If you're only a 30 point climber, I'd much prefer it if you climb on the corner.

I guess this is true. I hadn't really though about this possibility since my team wasn't a cycler. By the way, I think that for most teams, if it takes long enough to climb that you're blocking things you probably shouldn't bother climbing.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0

How does this work? With the climber I assume the it's just viewing angle that changes.

Also, for the shooters, it's surprising to me that they'd have only one shooting position on the whole field. Was it just that the drivers that weren't confident that they could line up right from elsewhere? It seems like you could always just drive closer to the 2 pt. goals unless it was confusing a vision-based aiming system.

It depends on your robot. Our original shooter was designed with a lead screw system and vision tracking so we could shoot from anywhere on the field (hypothetically) with a few primary positions around the pyramid/mid field. Point, shoot, go.

After our original design didn't work out at GSR Week 1 we redesigned our robot. One of the sacrifices we made was change our pivot from the lead screw system to a piston. This limited us to really 3 positions for the 3pt goal (Back middle, back left, and back right). The piston worked better towards our withholding allowance because once taken off it went into the event as a COTS item whereas our original lead screw design was about 5lbs of prefabricated materials. It was also extremely easy to integrate into our design and program.

This was something a lot of teams did by keeping it simple. Unfortunately many of them only tuned in their back of the pyramid shot with little to no practice on the corners. Its not too hard but it does require more care when lining up so you are aimed at the goal and depending on how you line up you sit further away from the pyramid so for many their back of the pyramid speed may not be the same for the corner.


For our climber it really does have implications of where we start climbing. Due to the design we have a window of about 2-4 inches horizontally on the bar we need in order to fit in the top once we climb. If we transition to climbing up the side of the pyramid, we are probably only good for 20 since it is extremely hard to determine the middle of the bar from across the field perpendicular to the robot. This is why we avoid the sides. The front of the pyramid isn't too hard for us really its a matter of wasted time. If we are shooting from the back of the pyramid, we can transition from climbing to shooting in 2 seconds while we could lose 5-10 seconds going to line up at the front of the pyramid. This is also why we don't like the side faces it would take way too long to line up on.

See this video and you can see what I mean with how easy it is to line up. Since this video, our transition time has been cut in half through some fancy programming and our climb is now faster by 5 seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNNEld7uBJo

[Igreenman]

Our team, 3752 deiced to be able to do a climb. We saw it as a game decider and the hardest part of the game. Even thou we wanted a great climbing and dumping robot we didn’t want to lose the opportunity of flexibility. So climbing wasn’t the most important part of the game but it posed an amazing opportunity to test anyone’s design capabilities. Climbing was merely an opportunity to put up a lot of points (theoretically), that theory was demolished early on when some teams were putting up 68ish points with just disks.

As I am biased to my teams design I have to say that our middle climb was a lot more stable than most teams that tried to climb. We only ever fell of one time, and it was then we bumped bumpers at the top of the pyramid with another teams and we got stuck. Out dump bucket hit the 30 point bar and pushed up off just far enough to unhook one of our climbing hooks. On the upside we did a graceful 360 off the top and only fractured 2 wheels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69inPiS0Om4
This is what it looked like when it was working properly; At St. Joe regional.

[karomata]

I feel that if the magnetic wheel was more widely attempted and used (the one team that made it work to a degree of obvious general knowledge being 118), some teams would have found ways to make it much faster than the corner climbers that used hooks. Unfortunately, 118 found that it was more beneficial for them to shoot instead of climb to the 3rd level, so they never used their level 3 climber, and I believe they also took it off (don't quote me on that one). However, if the approach to climbing using a magnetic wheel was more used, I think it would have become the most popular method to be integrated into robots that wanted to level 3 climb mid competition season. But the again as we have all seen, there weren't even any level 3 climbs on Einstein, therefore climbing in any degree was proven to not be the best strategy for Ultimate Ascent. The highest climb there was on Einstein was 148's level 2 climb, which the additional 20 points, while greatly helping their score, was not too great in its value because of the extreme scoring abilities of some of the other robots on Einstein. I really would have liked to see the climbing point values upgraded/modified so that climbing to level 3 was worth doing. I find it rather depressing that the hardest challenge FIRST has ever presented was heavily under valued, to the point where in most divisional elimination matches, climbing was rather scarce.