50 Pt. Climbs

[Francis-134]

You all bring up great points as to why climb and dump robots were not as successful as was predicted or hoped. As a member of a team that built such a robot this year, hopefully I can lend some insight.

The crux of the issue comes down to the fact that building a robot that can complete the wombo combo is really difficult! As shown through the season, a 30 point climb is very challenging, and brings a lot of risks if not looked at carefully. Take my team as an example. We never successfully completed a 30 point climb at our first regional and fell off the pyramid three times during the season (as an aside, it is quite a site to see your pit crew jumping on the robot frame to bring it back into square). Add in collecting and dumping frisbees and you have a very complex robot that is already not a realistic solution for most teams.

As far as raw points are concerned, a climb and dump must be part of other point differential methods to be competitive at a high level. At a regional, a 50 point play is already enough to put you above most third partners on an alliance. If you can throw in a 12 or 18 point auto mode, you can boost yourself to a very competitive robot. Championship is a different story. If your alliance's goal is to win the entire thing, you basically need to beat a four-cycle robot pretty consistently. Look at the following:

Four-Cycle
Auto: 18
Teleop: 48 (4 disks * 4 cycles * 3 points per disk)
Endgame: 10
Total: 72

Wombo Combo
Auto: 0
Teleop: 0
Endgame: 50
Total: 50

Somewhere in there, you have to create a 22 point differential between you and your opponent robots. As mentioned in the Twenty-Four blog, you can hope to do this by playing enough defense to remove a cycle, and then score at least 12 points in autonomous. Is it possible to remove an entire cycle’s worth of points in 60-70 seconds of defense? Yes, but it is very difficult (see GTR West QF 1.1 as we manage to remove at least one cycle from 1114/2056).

The big problem is that you now HAVE to score a complete wombo combo at the end of the match, which as I mentioned before, is very difficult to execute with a high degree of consistency. Failing to climb to 30, and/or not getting the disks out will put you way too far behind to win.

All of this also highlights the big issue with the strategy; you cannot carry an elimination alliance to victory off of a climb and dump alone. High powered disk robots that can complete 6+ cycles and a 10 point hang on their own can lift otherwise poor alliances above mediocre ones through sheer firepower. Taking GTR West QF 1.1 as an example, despite the fact that we did what we needed to do, there is no way that our robot could carry this alliance over 1114 or 2056. This comes back down to the ceiling issue, as pointed out before.

This begs the question "Why would anyone build a robot that cannot compete?" At the beginning of the seasons, if you looked at previous years robots and games that involved shooting, you could have make a fair argument that shooting is hard to do and would not be all that accurate unless you are a high level team. This played out to a certain extend this season, but the floor for shooting accuracy was much higher than it was in previous years (i.e. a 50 percentile shooter this year would score about 8 disks, and 12 points on average in autonomous, while a 50 percentile robot from 2011 is probably only good for points in autonomous or a handful of balls in the 2 pt. goal). The other answer to this question is that for many teams, there is something inherently fun and awesome about taking on a cool or unique challenge. It was a great feeling to finally see our robot pull off the wombo combo, and seeing it do it each and every time afterward seemed to be sweeter and sweeter.

From a game design standpoint, it would have been really cool for the upper parts of the pyramid to have been worth more points, bringing the climb and dump robots into the fold a little more. That being said, I have no regrets with our team’s decision.

[Brandon Holley]

I think it all comes down to 3 points:

1. Climbing to 30 was really hard.

2. Climbing to 30 consistently was even harder.

3. Because of points 1 and 2, you are now in a high risk 'all or nothing' type of strategy.

The last point is something many teams overlooked. Shooting points came in small chunks. While those chunks were smaller than a 50 point climb, they were generally easier to attain chunks. A team could build to 50 points and beyond over the course of an entire match, instead of executing one maneuver.

To me for a dedicated climb and dump robot to be picked they needed to have extremely high consistency.


At Orlando we chose 4451 as our first pick from the 2nd seed (declining the 1st seed, and passing up several other shooting robots) because based on our scouting data, they had the highest probability of scoring 50+ points a match. The reason for this was their near flawless execution of just getting to the top every match. They did not disappoint us as they climbed to the top in all 9 of our elimination matches.



-Brando

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

2. Climbing to 30 consistently was even harder.

In qualification matches I believe the number of matches with >30 climbing points (ie all three bots climbed 10 or 1 or more climbed above 10) was less than 20% all season. (Ok, I know it was less than 20% but I can't recall the exact number my data showed)

I have some other theories but I need to think of how to word them...

[D.Allred]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

My question, mostly to teams that attempted this but also to those who considered it, is why did you find this strategy successful or unsuccessful?

We found the strategy very successful for multiple reasons.

First of all, we owe a great debt to 1114’s Effective FIRST Strategies guide. Our goal before the season was to find a simple and effective approach to scoring following 1114’s golden rules. Apparently the Game Design Committee had a different plan.

We knew a disc shooting robot would have a higher scoring potential and therefore be a “better” strategy. But we didn’t know if we were capable of building that machine our first year. Climbing and dumping would still give us a very high score without the strain of prototyping disc shooters and queuing systems. We dedicated all our efforts to climbing hoping the dumper would be easy. (As it turned out, dumping was a bit trickier than I first imaged.)

We knew the scoring potential of our strategy put us in almost certain position to make regional elimination rounds. We also felt climbing and dumping would be a great complementary robot to a shooter making it harder for the opposing alliance to pick someone to defend. Making in the top 8 twice was a pleasant but slightly unexpected bonus. Getting picked by 125 and playing with 233 at Orlando was a blast!

Ultimately this strategy, or our performance, wasn’t strong enough to make the elimination rounds on Newton. We added some defense to our Newton game plan, but I agree that our scoring cap, low autonomous output, and all-or-nothing scoring was the key limiting factor. I was very happy to see 190 make eliminations with a similar robot. They played great and had a better autonomous scoring potential than our robot. Well done!

Here’s the real success story to the strategy. We also knew a climber / dumper would differentiate us and bring more visibility to our program in the FRC community (hopefully not the spectacular failing kind.) This success also gave us greater exposure in the school and community. As a result, we’ve had more students apply for the team this season than we can handle.

There’s more to this game than robots.

David

[cmrnpizzo14]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

At Orlando we chose 4451 as our first pick from the 2nd seed (declining the 1st seed, and passing up several other shooting robots) because based on our scouting data, they had the highest probability of scoring 50+ points a match. The reason for this was their near flawless execution of just getting to the top every match. They did not disappoint us as they climbed to the top in all 9 of our elimination matches.

Why weren't there more teams like this? No offense to 4451, they are a great team. However, if a rookie can build a robot that can deliver consistently enough to do this, why didn't more teams? Someone please correct me if there were but I don't remember any other bots off the top of my head that did that.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

Why weren't there more teams like this? No offense to 4451, they are a great team. However, if a rookie can build a robot that can deliver consistently enough to do this, why didn't more teams? Someone please correct me if there were but I don't remember any other bots off the top of my head that did that.

How many teams at Orlando had already attended an event? Not to take away from 4451 but they had already attended a regional and had a chance to shake down their bot.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by cmrnpizzo14

Why weren't there more teams like this? No offense to 4451, they are a great team. However, if a rookie can build a robot that can deliver consistently enough to do this, why didn't more teams? Someone please correct me if there were but I don't remember any other bots off the top of my head that did that.

I think these teams got lost in the giant group of teams who attempted to 30 point climb, had the mechanisms but didn't use them due to weight, complexity with a system as a whole, or abandoned them at the last second.

Our team was close to falling into this catagory when our original shooter/climber combo didn't integrate by 1/2in. at our first regional. We went with the climber for the rest of the event because our shooter game wasn't that great and improved it for Pine Tree (along with cutting our climb time drastically by 65%) to become an auto, 3-4 cycles, climbing robot. I know of a lot of other teams we encoutered this season who either had a 30 point climber on their robot or the space was clearly allocated but never used. Other planned on making or integrating their climbers later on in the season but the effort wasn't worth it if you could pull of 1-2 cycles in the final 20-30 seconds of a match.

[EricDrost]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

How many teams at Orlando had already attended an event? Not to take away from 4451 but they had already attended a regional and had a chance to shake down their bot.

4451 was also nearly flawless at Palmetto, a week 1 event. These guys are the real deal, rookie or not. Without seeing their future robots, I would put money on them being a top 20% team every year from here on out.

[AdamHeard]

I'll likely catch some flak for this, but a lot of teams don't know what they don't know.

A 30 point climber that was even halfway sort of kind of fast was not a system you could just BS the design on. You had to have some idea of what you're doing. Double this if you wanted it to be easily aligned, and work every single time.

Without an ME (or a tradesmen with some real experience) completing such a system was going to be real difficult. Some teams probably did without this, as it is possible to guess right on things sometimes.

Our scouting data had the 24th team in our division averaging ~50 points. This was their average though. A dedicated 50 point climber could not possibly average their maximum (unless they were literally flawless). So at the champs level it wasn't viable.

At regionals if a team averaged 30-35 points of a 50 point climb, they wouldn't miss elims at any event (most likely) and would likely be a 1st round pick/seed.

[efoote868]

I think another thing to look at is the timeline of the rules, specifically.

Early in the season, rules pertaining to climbing were different. Given a strict interpretation of the rules before January 15th, climbing the pyramid was incredibly difficult and was likely written off by many teams.

Two weeks into the season, the rules relaxed and rule 23-1 was introduced.

I'd venture to guess that many teams can't toss out a third of their build season to react to a rule change of that magnitude. That is to say if they weren't planning to climb before that point, they likely weren't going to redo their designs to include it.

Edit - That also includes the assumptions they made about climbing. If it wasn't worth a team's resources to climb, their outlook on the game was likely different.

[LeelandS]

As a team that had originally planned for the 50pt climb + dump, here is my take on things.

We decided to go for the 50 points because we were basically going to dedicate the entire 6 weeks to the effort. We were confident that we would be able to develop a robot to make it work in 6 weeks. The 50pts would have been a huge swing, especially at our Week 1 regional at Finger Lakes, especially where we only saw two robots climb for 30 all weekend, one who didn't do so until elimination rounds, and one who stopped half way through qualifications after a fall. Of these two, only one could dump.

In a lot of ways, I was the unraveling of this plan. I have a deep issue with one trick robots, largely along the lines of "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." Especially when the dropping of this basket breaks all the eggs, the basket, and anything beneath it. Oh, and the basket costs $3500. I pushed to develop a shooter (for the autonomous points, and as a fall-back plan). The extra weight and complexity drew away from the resources for climbing, and we ended up scrapping the climber Week 5, and rapidly developing a 10pt climb in the last week, and purely cycling. Would we have successfully developed the climber if we hadn't gone to shooting? I don't know.

Truth be told, I'm glad we did this. We ended up seeding 5th at the event, captaining the #4 alliance, and winning the event. As a cycler, we were mediocre at best, averaging about 2 cycles in a good match. But the 18pt autonomous (in which we were very consistent), the 10pt climb, and the 24 disc points we earned were more than enough, and we were more consistent then I imagined we would have been climbing for 30, then dropping those 4 discs into the goal. Plus, we weren't put into that precarious position that could have ended our season.

The plus side is, improving our ability to score (i.e. better cycling) raised our point ceiling. After swapping gearboxes at Worlds, we were consistently getting 3 cycles, sometimes 4. Were it not for unrelated consistency issues, we would have been much more effective. Meanwhile, dedicated 50pt climb and dumpers were still scoring 50pts. It doesn't matter how quickly or efficiently the climb and dump is accomplished, as long as it is done.

In the long run, I think it comes down to consistency vs points, factoring in a team's resources. 1114 and 67 were the top climb-and-dumpers this season. Not many teams have their resources. We definitely didn't. If a team had the resources to effectively manufacture that kind of climbing device, more power to them. Many teams don't have those resources, but many teams tried. So we saw many teams of varying consistencies go for those points, with many failed attempts.

[Jared]

Our team built a 30 point climber, and it was the most successful robot we've had in a long time. We seeded fourth at our regional, almost exclusively due to our climber, and 13th in Archimedes (we weren't picked though).

Our strategy from the beginning was to shoot three in autonomous, full court shoot about 10 discs, and climb/dump. However, we had some problems. In both our events, our competition shooter performed significantly different from our practice one. At home, we could fire 10 out of 12 discs in the three point goal from full court in 40 seconds, including line up time, but we never made any full court shots at competition, only autonomous ones. We spent a LOT of time on our climber, and our climb time was 30 seconds to the top, which we bumped up to 18 seconds, then we broke our last spare worm wheel, and then went back to 30 seconds. Besides for this issue (we used 3 CIMS on a transmission designed for only 2, which is why it failed), our climber was mechanically perfect, and made it to the top every time it started.

If you're interested, here's a video of us climbing with the slow deployment mechanism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL7eT4H2ARM

However, the climber had a fair share of disadvantages. The whole subsystem weighed about 30 pounds, and took a long time to perfect. We must have made 20 different iterations of the hooks before settling on the final one. It was expensive, as it used two five start (on the faster version 8 start) lead screws, which weren't cheap. Also, it was difficult to line up quickly, and our deployment mechanism at our first event was extremely slow. We used our shooter to dump the discs at the top, which was a poor strategy, as the depth of the goal in Archimedes varied by over 1/2", something we didn't think to test at home.

We also fell from the top of the tower, and really destroyed the robot. The frame of the robot above the wheels was destroyed and had multiple broken welds, so we ended up removing our shooter, hopper, and all the motors up there and replacing the structure of the robot with a spare one. We also built a new hopper. The scariest damage was the climber deployment lead screw, which had bent at a 90 degree angle, but through some miracle, we managed to bend it back and get it working again. Then, we found that our power distribution board was dead, so we had to rewire about 20 really inconveniently placed connections. Overall, this was NOT worth it!

With that said, climbing was a lot of fun, and if we had a little more time (and not lost a week to the snow storm!!!) we could have had a really awesome robot. Overall, the biggest problem with most climbers was reliability.

Our robot scored an average of about 60 points per match (with a potential of scoring 68 max with auto points). For fun, we trying cycling in a practice match (no driver practice with cycling!), and got 5 cycles with missing only 3 discs (but with no defense/climb).

[MrBasse]

We had several ideas for ways to get to the top that came from students. Some that were designed with way more in depth mechanisms than what we finally settled on. But our final design took some items from all of them, simplified them, and added in a heavy dose of gravity and some extra pneumatics for some help and things worked pretty well all season for us. Our robot was really durable, our only malfunctions came from a leaking solenoid module, and then from dropping a screw that got lost between the connections for the RSL. I was surprised that we could get a tiny screw to land there, but more surprised to learn that the RSL shorting can fry the sidecar instantly.

We felt that we were pretty successful this year, semi-finals at MSC is nothing to look down on. If we hadn't changed strategies in the second and third matches there is a chance we could have made it to the finals too (still can't figure out why we played defense on a broken robot rather than going for our climb).

We had a consistent climb, a 3-4 disc auto and could pick up 1-2 discs if we felt we had time. Our goal was a 68 point round and we hit that pretty often. 62 points was a lot more common as we had a third auto disc issue that we just couldn't figure out. With those numbers we were still quite often the highest scorer on our alliance. Things changed a little bit when we got pair up with some of the super teams at MSC but in those cases we were running out of white discs making us even more valuable.

With that said, I don't think that the 50 point climb teams have anything to worry about when looking back at their seasons. We are happy we did it simply because it was an amazing challenge. We knew we could pick up discs and score a few more points, but we wanted to do the climb because we knew not everyone would. There is something to be said for a group taking the more difficult path solely because it is more difficult. I think the biggest smile I had all season was at kickoff when my students said that they were no doubt going to climb, and maybe shoot discs if we had to...