Mistakes

[J2Kraatz]

How many people realized that they built the kind of robot this year. I know I am not the only one. Where did you screw up we built a stacker and saw that bulldozers won the Great Lakes Regional basically.



Jason "J2" Kraatz

Reminding you to think outside the bot.

[katie86]

We built a bulldozer, but it had stacking capabilities...

...that we never used except for one time in practice.

[Daniel Brim]

We too built a stacker. We think it will work well, if we can get our drove system working. If it is working. then we can get it working.

Our main mistake was putting too much effort into that and not more on the drive system. We are still overheating and having troubles going up the ramp.

At a team meeting today we said (if I am not mistaken), that our drive system works, then our next priority would be our stacker.

Unfortunately, since we need to go under the bar with our current drive system (since the castors on our robot do not work well on the ramp, we are stuck in our underbar mode. Our robot can make it up the ramp if we are dead straight, like we did in match 1 in Phoenix, but if we aren't dead strait, breakers start popping and the castors turn making it hard to make it up the ramp.

[Sophey Chan]

I wouldn't say we screwed up in our design. We built a stacker, which is great, cause we can do 4 easily usually, cause msot get knocked, but ours had enough force to be a blocker, and king of the hill, and we have a working auto with wings, which with our foorce is schweet in collisions in auto. Oak Ridge's is about the same. Most people don't liek stacking, but in some competitions, it is the best thing.

[jadien]

694's robot, Lola, was designed to be a stacker, stack-stealer, and stack-protector, but we wound up with a sweet bulldozer. Its arm and grabber are excellent for knocking down multiple hill stacks, and its drive system made it probably the fastest robot at the NYC regionals while still in a low enough gear with enough traction to go toe-to-toe with devoted bulldozers like 19's and 395's.

[GregT]

Haveing built a stacker wasn't a mistake.

Greg

[kristen]

It's a mistake if you don't use it sucessfully.

[Yan Wang]

Yes, we did not succeed in stacking many times, Kristen, but at least we could.

The reason it wasn't a mistake was because we could push any robot... I just watched the video of Chesapeake again (I got it from Rog but still need to digitize it) and saw that there were many box type robots designed to push bins/knock over stacks, but we had more torque than them. So we became a pusher, but the ability to also stack was a useful other feature.

Btw, talking about box type robots and extra features, could someone from 384 explain what that T-shaped bar on Sparky was supposed to do? The only useful purpose I remember was being cocky and waving it up and down in Chesapeake

[Matt Reiland]

We built a stacker bucause it is important, but we only let the stacking team have 24lbs, the rest was left for the tank drivetrain with air-shifter all down low so we wouldn't fall over and armor all around.

It seemed almost all of the stackers were somewhat top heavy and only a few (67) realized it and made self righting mechanisms.

[mtaman02]

not to throw the subject off a lil. but only 3 weeks of competitions have gone by and from what i see u all built robots with high scoring capabilities. both stacking and dead recknoning / line tracking robots

no one team has screwed up at all. stacking machines at the NYC regional looked cool. i didn't see much stacking though. if anything i saw a lot of bulldozer machines espicially a look alike bulldozer from i think it was 1230 the leonics with their robot leo. hope i got the team name number and robot name right !!

if its one thing i saw teams screwing up on; it was their ability to drive up the ramp. many of the teams got stuck at the bottom / middle of the ramp. whether it was caused by a slow robots drivetrain or improper material used as drive material or they just over heated. i expected many of the teams to do belt drive this year but i see alot of wheeld robots instead.

Basically though no team has screwed up at all with their robots. and to add this competition this year calls on both stacking and bulldozing capabilities to make a high scoring match rather then previous years where teams relied on 1 type of robot to make a high scoring match

2001 - required a ball grabber machine that could grab and balance 2 goals with the remaining 3 robots in the end zone
2002 - ball grabber robot that can control 2 goals
2003 - stacker or bull dozer robots that can move boxes.

this is just my opinion!!

[T967]

if its one thing i saw teams screwing up on; it was their ability to drive up the ramp. many of the teams got stuck at the bottom / middle of the ramp. whether it was caused by a slow robots drivetrain or improper material used as drive material or they just over heated. i expected many of the teams to do belt drive this year but i see alot of wheeld robots instead.

We won so many matches because of this it's not even funny. Some teams might want to concider using the gyro to help control your bot on the ramp. From a driver's point of view it works great.

[Alexander McGee]

Yea, we thought that stacking wouldnt be a huge factor in the game, however it is, but, stacks are easily knocked down. SO, we went with a king of the hill bot. Works great, cept for a few autonomous probs, but ive seen a lot of stackers "converting" at regionals.