[MCC] Minimum Competitive Concept 2014

[RunawayEngineer]

Originally Posted by inkling16

I think it tends to be a good strategy as well, however you have to hedge your bets.

I would rather make the elims with a partner who I don't want than not make elims at all.

By all means, hedge your bets and try to get numbers on the board to get noticed.
I just worry that many teams think that the only way to win/get picked is the "primary" game, so they don't look for alternatives. Meanwhile, the captains of seeds 1-3 are digging through data to find any means to differentiate between the middle 12 robots.

[Chris is me]

I would argue the minimum competitive concept did not even need floor pickup. The ability to receive a ball from a human player and kiss pass it / spit the ball out is the minimum that was really needed to be competitive. Alternatively, a robot that was only capable of receiving the ball and then giving it back to the human player was a good robot.

We definitely would have had a better season if we built 5136's robot than what we fielded. 5254 had a very similar robot and was very competitive at its events this year.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I would argue the minimum competitive concept did not even need floor pickup. The ability to receive a ball from a human player and kiss pass it / spit the ball out is the minimum that was really needed to be competitive. Alternatively, a robot that was only capable of receiving the ball and then giving it back to the human player was a good robot.

We definitely would have had a better season if we built 5136's robot than what we fielded. 5254 had a very similar robot and was very competitive at its events this year.

I strongly disagree. By adding the floor pickup the MCC also becomes a reasonable contender for being the middle bot in a 3 bot no truss cycle. Still worth a fair number of points. It's a tactical flexibility that is simple enough to add to be worth it.

Typically floor pickups are considered a nice to have, but with only one game piece they become more important. Oh, HP inbounds bad, or robot is hit and misses getting the ball? Suddenly you're out an assist.

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I strongly disagree. By adding the floor pickup the MCC also becomes a reasonable contender for being the middle bot in a 3 bot no truss cycle. Still worth a fair number of points. It's a tactical flexibility that is simple enough to add to be worth it.

Typically floor pickups are considered a nice to have, but with only one game piece they become more important. Oh, HP inbounds bad, or robot is hit and misses getting the ball? Suddenly you're out an assist.

"Simple enough" is the assumption I find debatable. Even if a team builds an intake that works, their driver has to be able to get to the ball. A whole other issue for many FRC drivers...

We modified many alliance partners to reach the MCC level, and they competed better not only in our match together, but many other matches after that point. Modifying alliance partners to reach MCC was critical to seeding first this year.

Pickup ability was never a goal of ours when working with alliance partners to modify their robot. HP intake was always a requirement.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I strongly disagree. By adding the floor pickup the MCC also becomes a reasonable contender for being the middle bot in a 3 bot no truss cycle. Still worth a fair number of points. It's a tactical flexibility that is simple enough to add to be worth it.

I think it is absolutely worth trying, as a failed mechanism could simply be fixed to the frame and made into what I described. However, I don't believe it's the minimum competitive concept.

I think the minimum competitive concept is a combination of a tank drive for defense and the simplest possible way to get an assist into a cycle. A "pass back" robot can kiss pass to another robot anywhere on the field, put it in the low goal, or pass back to any human player (remember, you don't have to pass back to the SAME player!). Floor pickup is nice, but not absolutely required to be a quality third-assist robot.

After spending weeks of build season on building the best intake we could, and designing the entire robot around the best pickup prototype (a claw design), I was shocked at just how little we picked up off the floor this year. At the end of one off-season, we lost the ability to actuate our arm downward to do floor pickup. We put up basically the same number of points we did otherwise. Perhaps the only role that really could use a floor pickup is the post-truss finisher (trusses miss sometimes), but you don't need to play every role to be the minimum competitive concept.

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Typically floor pickups are considered a nice to have, but with only one game piece they become more important. Oh, HP inbounds bad, or robot is hit and misses getting the ball? Suddenly you're out an assist.

Any other robot on the alliance can just pass to an HP to give you another chance at assist 3. In my opinion this is easier than chasing the ball twice.

[BrendanB]

Something to remember is that Aerial Assist was so different from previous games because the most basic robot that could play the game was one that just briefly possesses the ball either by supporting the ball (chairbot), herds the ball (kitbot), or launches the ball (passbackbot). Aerial Assist can be played at a bare miminum with the kibot.

Because this bare minimum is made by most teams on their first day or two of the season adding a floor intake (like 5136) when you see that you have six weeks left of build season is a smart idea. Turning an under performing team at an event into a passback/basic inbound possession bot is a wise idea when you are at or nearing the end of those six weeks.

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Agreed. Looking back its extremely easy to see how a few strands of surgical tubing on a robot were a huge asset in the final rounds but I would not encourage a team to build a trampoline bot back in week 1 (which was a concept we penciled out day 1). If a kitbot with a basic structure and surgical tubing is what you can build might I suggest Vex or FTC which might better suit your team? Teams like 5136, 4908, 5112, and 4909 were extremely good at what they did with just intakes and practiced drivers.

Sadly when teams are successful at building a MCC you tend to get picked in tough positions (usually first/second round of the bottom four alliances) which is what happened to us in 2011.

This. We tried to build the 'ultimate assist & catch' robot last year and we wound up getting picked first-round at both events, but by the lower-half of the grid. We then got knocked out in the quarter-finals at both of our events, it's a tough fight for seeds 5-8!

[mman1506]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I strongly disagree. By adding the floor pickup the MCC also becomes a reasonable contender for being the middle bot in a 3 bot no truss cycle. Still worth a fair number of points. It's a tactical flexibility that is simple enough to add to be worth it.

Typically floor pickups are considered a nice to have, but with only one game piece they become more important. Oh, HP inbounds bad, or robot is hit and misses getting the ball? Suddenly you're out an assist.

Cough... Cough....