How Would You Change Your Robot

[Charles Boehm]

This isn't a change, but I wish myself and my team would've prototyped one or two wheeled shooters. That thought hadn't even crossed our minds as an effective way to shoot. But it evidently was, as 254 showed us all.

[Dragonking]

SKYSTALKER but better

Enough said.

[mlantry]

-Faster catapult reset
-not having a variable hard stop
-able to shoot with intake in frame perimeter
-modified our side plate design because doing anything by the wheels or chain was a pain in the butt because we had c channel plates

[jagen31]

Perhaps a shot into the high goal when positioned up against the low goal. Several strategy options open up given that ability. We saw the shot angle out of Barrage able to consistently put a ball into the high goal not only positioned up against the low goal, but up against another robot against the low goal as well.

Moreover, at Archimedes, I know a lot of us were very impressed when the eighth seed alliance used a strategy we had considered to take them to semis and almost to finals, where one robot would sit at the low goal the entire match and receive inbound passes from a human-player, shooting the ball into the high goal and putting up consistently high (300+ clean points) marks.

Imagine a long sweet-spot shot combined with a reverse-shot from the low goal so long range scores are possible, but if we get engaged in a pushing match, we can back out and pivot straight to the low goal, and score it for the full 40 points instead of settling for 31, plus we wouldn't have to turn to shove the collector into the low goal for the dump. Only problem is we have a tall back flap that gets in the way but we could always reinstall our shorter one.

Its nice to dream... eh? I bet we could add another mechanism with the 5 pounds for IRI... Then again, it would probably have to be made of neoprene or balsa wood to fit within weight constraints

And what else? The sky is the limit. Maybe a dual collector for three ball autonomous? Maybe add a gyro for super cool auto modes? Put the camera back on the robot? Notice those improvements all have to do with the autonomous period. I'm a programmer, what else would I want?

Probably the simplest improvement would be to add one of those driver precision flashlights, because they look sleek and seem useful for alignment. Even then, indicator LEDs that change based on our catapult state machine would be nice. We had those nearly operational earlier in the season!

[nuclearnerd]

Originally Posted by jagen31

Perhaps a shot into the high goal when positioned up against the low goal. Several strategy options open up given that ability. We saw the shot angle out of Barrage able to consistently put a ball into the high goal not only positioned up against the low goal, but up against another robot against the low goal as well.

Our sweet spot was carefully designed to be from against the low goal, to 36" (+ a bit) back from the low goal. Also our shot was designed to leave the front of the bot 60" in the air. Few things made me happier than those times when we shifted into low gear, pushed a defender into the low goal, and then scored over their heads

[PingPongPerson]

We underestimated the weighting of assist points. I wish that our robot could have passed the ball back through its intake, instead of having to shoot it out. We also had a very short distance between tie points for our elastic bands. If we had used a longer distance I think our accuracy/precision would have greatly increased.

[BrendanB]

I think one aspect we wish we could change is our ability to spit the ball back out onto the floor for a mouth to mouth pass. Once the ball is fully in our shooter it needs to be shot out of which we can do a full powered shot, soft shot, and a nice 1 point dump into the hopper of another robot. There were many times where we planned for the mouth to mouth and partially sucked the ball onto our bumper but once it was fully in the ring it was coming out through a pickup.

There are a few instances where it would have helped our strategy but what it mainly hurt was how teams ranked our robot which I felt contributed to us falling so low in the pickings in our division. We ended up working with three amazing robots and even if we didn't make it as far as Einstein I wouldn't have traded the experience we got from working with Nemesis, Torque, and Winnovation but we know the fact we couldn't spit it out once it was inbounded caused a lot of teams to second guess our robot being on their alliance.

This wasn't just a championship thing we noticed it all season when partners gave us a funny look that we couldn't spit out of our shooter. While designing we had prototyped our pickup that it could grab the ball and pull it out or use the back pickup to help push it to the front roller but once the final robot was assembled the ring had a different geometry than was prototyped.

Just like last year even though our robot was crazy and we may have missed some key concepts in the game like ground pickup was better than 20 extra climb points in 2013 or quick low passes coupled with some nice long catapult shots is better than accurately being able to throw the ball to your partners or yourself. In the end I still support our 2013 and 2014 robot designs as they keep pushing our team to do crazier things (that work!), set us apart from your everyday robots, and have their own elegance coupled with simplicity.

[Dunngeon]

Originally Posted by PingPongPerson

We underestimated the weighting of assist points. I wish that our robot could have passed the ball back through its intake, instead of having to shoot it out. We also had a very short distance between tie points for our elastic bands. If we had used a longer distance I think our accuracy/precision would have greatly increased.

Adding to this, I would have preferred metal springs on the robot instead of the elastic spring we used. It was too sensitive to heat difference (even between practice field and game field) and required a huge amount of effort to keep dialed in. I also would have gone to 6WD sooner in the year, rather than waiting until Championships to make the swap. Passing was key, and we didn't design for it.

Oh, and our bumpers + bumper mounts were trash all year long, even after 4x iterations between events.

[Thad House]

We would have added a way to do a shot from in front of the low goal, and a way to potentially pass the ball. Overall, we were very happy with how the robot performed. We actually never had any problems with surgical tubing this year, and the surgical tubing at championships was the same that was on the robot before bag day.

[PingPongPerson]

Originally Posted by Thad House

We would have added a way to do a shot from in front of the low goal, and a way to potentially pass the ball. Overall, we were very happy with how the robot performed. We actually never had any problems with surgical tubing this year, and the surgical tubing at championships was the same that was on the robot before bag day.

Correct me if I'm wrong. but you have the surgical tubing running under the entire length of the robot when stretched right? I think that if we had done that our shooter would have been more consistent.

[Thad House]

Originally Posted by PingPongPerson

Correct me if I'm wrong. but you have the surgical tubing running under the entire length of the robot when stretched right? I think that if we had done that our shooter would have been more consistent.

It was about 4 inches when slack, and about 10 when fully stretched.

[1493kd]

For the most part I think we had a good design this year. (Double intake that worked really good) I do not think we played to our strenghts and execuated strategies like we should have.

1. No Mecanum drive, never ever again- getting pushed around stinks. With that we are currently working on our first WCD for an offseason project.

2. Not having to turn sideways to shoot. Caused us to not have reliable auto.

3. Improving ease of bumper mounting. Hopefully the WCD will change this.