Ultimate Robot by year

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by themccannman

Sometimes it's interesting to speculate about what could have been. I think the OP is trying to get some input as to how a "perfect" bot could exist given what we saw during the season. Also some these robots almost did exist. 469 had an almost flawless robot this year, I'm sure if they really wanted they could have redesigned their robot to allow space and weight for a 30 point climber. However I think they'd have to do something similar to your design or 1986's as a ground pick up + corner climber isn't really possible. I also think that 233 had one of the best conceptual designs from the start. It had a ground pick up and telescoping shooter to be a 60" FCS. I think the complexity of what they tried to design somewhat limited their robot's ability this year, if it had been executed as planned though it could have been phenomenal.

In 2012 I'd say 1717 had a perfect robot, I honestly couldn't see any improvement too it other than perhaps adding a 973 style ground pick up, however their swerve drive somewhat nullifies that necessity. Their barrier crossing mechanism was a single small wedge, it really couldn't have been any smaller or lighter and took up almost no space on their robot so it wasn't really a trade-off, there was no reason not to have it.

There was one mechanism that you couldn't see on 1717 that they had to cross the barrier. They had a deployable parabolical rail that helped them get over the bump super smoothly. I think what Cory is saying is that even if these robots were possible(which is still very hard to do given the game rules), it would have been illogical to design a robot that could do EVERYTHING in this game because it would have detracted from the rest of the robot. The amount of work to tune, practice, prototype, and design a fast 30pt climb, dump, FCS, cycler, and intake is insane. Even if you had the time to build all those mechanisms in the 54" cylinder, 112" perimter, and weight limit, you would have 100 units of robot performing at 50% instead of 75 units of robot performing at 100%.