Team 610's Best Match at Waterloo

[Thomas610]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

610 has always the "capability" they just hadn't used it much in a match, probably due to lower accuracy levels than they wanted. I can't speak to what changes they made to make it realistic for them to high goal regularly in a match.

We designed the claw on our robot to have the capability to shoot high, but as Brennan said, we chose not to use it. Judging from our the sessions on our practice field with our 2013 robot playing heavy defense, we thought that shooting from the courtyard wasn't feasible. So we tried to go for a batter shot but found several issues, namely having to position the claw in code (lacking a mechanical hardstop) and the really tough geometry of the goal at that perspective.

Before ONWA we rebuilt the pivot mechanism that rotates our claw up and down as we were smoking motors often at GTRE (I think we switched motors 5 times). We added counterbalance that ensured that our claw would remain on the mechanical hardstop while in the shooting position (it wouldn't flop up and down as it would before). On practice day at ONWA we tried to get the batter shot down but found that there was too much error in our claw positioning for the shot to hit with anything greater than 65% accuracy.

We took some inspiration from our good friends over at 1241 and tried to find a supershot: a shot calibrated such that the apogee was in the goal while we had our wheels on the ground and about a foot off the batter. This effectively creates a zone where the top part of the parabolic trajectory of the shot will go into the goal (throwback to Aerial Assist), but that's not all... The best part is that when you drive onto the batter, the angle of the shot changes and the ball will still go in. We found a very specific speed with the claw on our hardstop in the shooting position, where we could shoot 4ish feet away from the batter to having two wheels on the batter and still have the ball go in.

To prevent defense from screwing with our shot, we yet again took a page out of 1241's book and used the diamond plate of the opposing driver station as a hardstop and to prevent defense from altering the angle of our shot.

TLDR: We made our claw pivot better and took some lessons in high goal shooting from 1241