Goalie in autonomous?

[one4robots]

Is anyone planning on playing goalie in autonomous? From my perspective, the hope of preventing an opponent from scoring during autonomous is not worth the cost of giving up your own scoring ability. Discuss.

[Michael Yeh]

It would be virtually impossible to do without fouling

G15
During AUTO,

a ROBOT starting in the white ZONE may not cross fully beyond the TRUSS
a ROBOT starting in its GOALIE ZONE must remain in contact with the carpet in its GOALIE ZONE.

Violation: FOUL. If contact with an opponent ROBOT, TECHNICAL FOUL.

[rwkling1]

Originally Posted by Michael Yeh

It would be virtually impossible to do without fouling

You can start in the goalie zone, and you can extend up as far as you want in the goalie zone. As long as you stay in the goalie zone, my interpretation is that you can play defense in autonomous.

[Animal Control]

defense in autonomous seems impossible with it having to be in the 6 inch diameter and be effective.

[homerun33ss]

I feel like your robot would have to be designed to play defense for the entire game. The way I see it, if your robot is playing defense during autonomous, it would have to block a minimum of 2 of the opposing alliance's shots. This is the only way that your alliance would get anything out of it.
If your robot is defending, that means there are only two robots on your team able to score. To even that out, you would have to block 1 shot, and even then the scoring would still be 2-2 for autonomous (assuming all the other robots make their shots).
If you want your alliance to come out of autonomous with any sort of advantage, you'd have to block a second shot so that the scoring ratio would end up being 2-1 (assuming all the other robots made their shots).

[Michael Yeh]

Oops, for some reason I imagined the goalie zone on the wrong side of the field...

[Rangel]

I think there will be one or two crazy awesome teams that are able to block shots in autonomous. At the highest level of play, you are also likely to have an alliance partner with a two ball autonomous. You would only need to block one ball for it to be worth it.

[JohnFogarty]

Before Team Update #1 our entire team wanted to become the ultimate goalie robot. We even joked about writing vision code to detect incoming balls in autonomous so that we could position ourselves/blockingmechanism in front of the incoming balls. Playing Goalie in autonomous has just as much value as scoring a ball into the high goal in autonomous, because you are preventing your opponent from scoring the same amount of points you have the potential of scoring If not more.

++Plus you just made their teleop scoring potential decrease because your opponent now much go retrieve the auto balls they missed before they can begin a cycle. Meanwhile your alliance can begin cycling right off the bat.

Playing goalie in autonomous has a lot more worth than you might think.

[faust1706]

Originally Posted by Rangel(kf7fdb)

I think there will be one or two crazy awesome teams that are able to block shots in autonomous. At the highest level of play, you are also likely to have an alliance partner with a two ball autonomous. You would only need to block one ball for it to be worth it.

2 things: how many people are going for a two ball autonomous? And how many teams are planning on detecting the presence of a goalie?

Blocking a shot in autonomous can be much more influential than the initial rejection of the 10 or 20 points. After autonomous, the team must score the ball that was blocked in order to begin their cycles.

[Rangel]

Originally Posted by faust1706

2 things: how many people are going for a two ball autonomous? And how many teams are planning on detecting the presence of a goalie?

Blocking a shot in autonomous can be much more influential than the initial rejection of the 10 or 20 points. After autonomous, the team must score the ball that was blocked in order to begin their cycles.

I would safely assume that there will be at least as many 2 ball autos as there were multi disk autos last year. Or at least close to that number. And yes blocking a shot is very powerful. That's why I would doubt some teams capable of doing this haven't thought about or considered it.

[bduddy]

I think people are underestimating in general how powerful a good goalie is. The extreme lack of game pieces in this game compared to past FRC games means that blocking a single shot is a huge advantage to an alliance, and that's not going to be all that hard to do. In particular, if you can keep one of an alliance's autonomous balls on the field, all of those truss points and assist points completely go away!

[JohnFogarty]

That statement would be correct, but there were never any assist points to be scored from the initial autonomous balls. They can't start scoring any assist points until they score all of the auto balls. Hence the advantage of keeping them from scoring it.

In effect. If you block one ball out of three during auto and continue to block that one ball from being scored in teleop. You just shut the alliance down. As basketball King James is now fondly aware, in reference to Durant. Defensive skills are everything.