Best launch angle and velocity: HANDS DOWN..

[Symph]

STEMpunk’s shooter, optimized with applied mathematics:

Ever wonder what the single greatest, most spectacular, ABSOLUTE BEST angle and velocity to shoot your game piece at is?

Well, for us, it’s 39 degrees at 42.5 feet per second.

(From ~43.3in above the ground. Giving us a 13.5 ft thick strip of the playing field to make the shot on.)

If you want to optimize your robot like we did ours, for 2014 or any other year involving a goal and a projectile, I would encourage you to read on and find out how got these numbers.

A week into the build season our robot was well past the first basic stages of design. Our team, having decided on the layout of our drivetrain (utilizing an unusual application of the mechanum drive) and our shooter, (a virtually one piece rig functioning as an all in one, passing, shooting, ground/ air pickup mechanism) needed to know now, what results our shooter should produce to classify as a “good shooter”.
The algorithms we contrived to give us this definition, if utilized properly, should afford most teams with the capability to find that one combination of angle and velocity giving them the single greatest, most spectacular, ABSOLUTE BEST strip of the playing field to make the shot from. You can find our results above. This is how we did it:

(See "MathProofCondensed.docx" attachment.)

No doubt you will want someone who enjoys rigorous mathematics suiting these calculations to your own robot, but it’s worth the work, as this not only draws a bold line between a "bad shooter" and a "good shooter", but also marks the difference between a "good shooter" and a "perfect shooter".