Not to jinx next year, but...

[Loose Screw]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

It's been a while since robots could carry a lot of game pieces. This year there was no legal limit, but very few carried more than eight (a 42 point stack) at a time. The past three years had limits of four or fewer game pieces at a time. I didn't check the rules for Logomotion (2011), but from the videos it looked like robots carried one inner tube at a time. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of relatively small balls in 2016, with no carry limit.

Within my team, I'm stumping for an off-season build of an autonomous robot that cleans up the balls from the tennis court and returns them to an open-topped box or bin; we should learn something useful for next year. And oh yes, tennis balls would be a nice 25th anniversary touch.

2011 had a limit of 1 tube at a time. Any more and the robots would look drastically different (look at FTC's Ring it Up).

I agree with tennis balls being a likely game piece for next year. I find the challenges with a carry limit to be more challenging than those without that cap. Carrying 4 blocks or 5 balls (previous FTC games) was easy, but stopping that 5th block and 6th balls was the real challenge there.

I think tennis balls are a good choice because there hasn't been an FRC gamepiece small enough to get stuck in your robot. Coaching an FTC team this year we struggled with the little balls getting caught in small gaps in our robot. I think FRC could use that challenge.