The FIRST day...

[Richard Wallace]

My team is at the St Louis regional. I'm an engineer/mentor who helps mostly with drivetrain and electrical things, so I had some extra time after we shipped the robot. I volunteered to help the FIRST crew at the regional.

I spent Thursday inspecting robots, and today doing sundry odd-jobs around the pits and playing field. I got a very good close-up view of many robots and many matches.

Some apparent trends:

(1) Stacking appears to be a waste of time because almost any robot can knock down a stack, and a robot that is powerful enough to defend a stack can usually get more points by finishing on top of the hill. Every stack that actually survived to count in scoring at St Louis today was made by a human player. The highest multiplier achieved today was six, and that only happened in one match.

(2) Powerful robots tend to win by forcing the wall to fall their way and then staying on the hill while forcing opponents off. Typical QP totals were about 100 for the winning alliance, and there were several high-scoring close matches where the winners got more than 200 QP. The highest QP total I recall was 250.

(3) Because of the ramp, this game is very hard on robots that are not built to take hard shoving and impacts. Many robots sustained major damage. Some left parts on the field. Several were disabled or knocked over. One emitted smoke during two of its matches.

(4) Lowriding robots can help win matches if they are driven well. I saw at least two matches in which opposing KOH robots shared the hill, while the lowrider on one side rounded up bins in its own scoring zone and also cleared bins away from the opponents' zone.