Team Update 15 (2016)

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by CalTran

There's a story here...

The 2009 field essentially turned robots into enormous Van der Graaf generators as the plastic wheels spun out on the floor. Then, the robots would occasionally make metal-to-metal contact with the alliance station walls -- ZAP! -- and the field (or robots) would crash.

That was a loooong weekend.

[Foster]

When this update came out there was much lamenting on how teams would be hurt by this change.

Now that the dust has settled and all the pre-Championship events are done, whats the final analysis?

In all the matches that I watched the flaps seemed to stop the rolling boulders.

I didn't see any robots get hung up on the flaps (some interesting bounces off the supports around them).

For your team was the change a big deal or just big drama?

[orangemoore]

Originally Posted by Foster

When this update came out there was much lamenting on how teams would be hurt by this change.

Now that the dust has settled and all the pre-Championship events are done, whats the final analysis?

In all the matches that I watched the flaps seemed to stop the rolling boulders.

I didn't see any robots get hung up on the flaps (some interesting bounces off the supports around them).

For your team was the change a big deal or just big drama?

Balls are getting stuck in the flaps which can cause issues.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Foster

.. was the change a big deal or just big drama?

It depends. For us, it didn't make much difference, as we had enough clearance under the bar to make the low bar crossing in either direction in one smooth move, and the plastic is stiff enough not to fit into the small gaps we present to the ceiling unless you change direction.

I saw a few teams which were a lot closer to not fitting that had to stop and reset midway across, and occasionally they would get a flap caught somewhere that would probably not have happened with the solid fabric and bar. This increased their crossing time. I didn't see any total tortugas as a result of this, but I expect that there have been some, or would have been without robot mods.

[Dezion]

Our robot was intentionally designed to avoid getting caught/catching on the original low bar design. We even included a step in our autonomous code to raise the the flap, so there would be no chance of it getting stuck in our robot. With the new flaps, this step of our autonomous code was useless. The new fabric itself presented no issues and our robot never got caught on it or damaged it. From my experience, I have never seen a robot get caught completely in the low bar due to the new fabric (that's not to say robots haven't got caught in the low bar due to other reasons).

The biggest issue that I noticed with the new low bar fabric was boulders getting stuck in the defense. This would mean that if we wanted to cross the low bar when a boulder was stuck in it, we would have rid the boulder from our robot first, causing us to spend a bit more time crossing the defense(or we could incur a foul). As well, occasionally, these boulders could interfere with our rhino treads as we crossed the defense.

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by Foster

When this update came out there was much lamenting on how teams would be hurt by this change.

Now that the dust has settled and all the pre-Championship events are done, whats the final analysis?

In all the matches that I watched the flaps seemed to stop the rolling boulders.

I didn't see any robots get hung up on the flaps (some interesting bounces off the supports around them).

For your team was the change a big deal or just big drama?

We're not 100% certain it was the cause, but it's possible that the car wash flaps unplugged our absolute encoder on our shooter arm in a match, which would have been protected with the single-piece weighted bar flap.

[Peyton Yeung]

Balls getting stuck in the flaps at the Indiana District Championships definitely messed up our alliance a few times. You can't drive though it with a ball (without getting a penalty) and it often jams up robots going from the courtyard to the neutral zone if the ball is stuck there.