Catapult vs Wheeled Shooter

[hutchMN]

I would say 4 of the top 5 bots in MN are catapults, but the best robot, 5172, is a flywheel.

[Chris is me]

A very good team, given enough iteration and development time, can make almost any design competitive.

However, I think it's pretty clear that catapults were the way to go this year, in retrospect, unless you really needed the packaging benefits of a wheeled shooter. Catapults could more easily shoot consistently and could more easily be built to shoot over a defender from the outer works.

[Peyton Yeung]

We pretty early on leaned away from a wheeled shooter since we were worrying about ball consistency and we didn't think we would need very fast shooting times. We made a pretty consistent pneumatic catapult in 2014. We are pretty good with catapults so we decided to stay with it this year.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

However, I think it's pretty clear that catapults were the way to go this year, in retrospect, unless you really needed the packaging benefits of a wheeled shooter. Catapults could more easily shoot consistently and could more easily be built to shoot over a defender from the outer works.

Citation needed?

If you look at the top 20 teleop high goal OPR teams, only 5 of them (195, 1024, 118, 148, 230) are catapults.

If anything, side-by-side dual wheel shooters a la 971, 987, and countless others were the way to go this year.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Citation needed?

If you look at the top 20 teleop high goal OPR teams, only 5 of them (195, 1024, 118, 148, 230) are catapults.

If anything, side-by-side dual wheel shooters a la 971, 987, and countless others were the way to go this year.

It's pretty clear multiple designs can be optimized this year to a level of effectiveness good enough for high level play, and it's kind of hard to just go with the most popular design as the best one. After all (and I know I will get flak for this) mecanum drive was almost strictly better than traction drive last year, particularly for landfill robots, yet lots of top teams stayed away from it. This wasn't necessarily because they made the wrong choice - in a lot of cases, they decided they could more easily optimize the type of system they know better.

We have had a LOT of games with wheeled shooters in the last decade for foam balls - it's a known problem with lots of examples of great designs. We have had relatively few catapult games, and the catapult games featured much larger balls being thrown farther than the small balls, so the catapult design was more exotic.

Maybe it would have been more accurate to say "I think a catapult would have been better for my team", than the general case.

[mathking]

I think other posters are correct to point out that no choice is inherently better. The right choice is the one that works best on your robot. We prototyped some catapults and wheeled shooters. Initially we shied away from a catapult because the initial designs we tested uses pneumatics and we wanted to avoid the loss of space. Then the kids made some good motor powered catapults and we had two choices for fairly accurate, consistent shooting. Ultimately it was our design criteria that made the decision for us. The team decided that quick, consistent scoring was more important than necessarily high scoring. Wanting a robot that could score both low and high was easier on our chassis (our number one design priority was a robust, consistent drive train) with a two wheeled shooter than with a catapult because the two wheeled shooter was also able to gather and manipulate the portcullis and cheval. This made the overall robot less complicated and made it easier to fit under the low bar. The best catapult design we had would certainly have been a good choice. It just wasn't the best choice given our overall design and the priorities we set at the start of the build season.

I will also say I am glad that we create a design hierarchy at the start of each season. It made the (often passionate) debate over shooter design choices easier to make. And the kids who developed the catapult were left not with a "our design wasn't good enough" feeling but the realization that the two wheeled shooter design simply worked better with the rest of our robot.

[jspatz1]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Citation needed?

If you look at the top 20 teleop high goal OPR teams, only 5 of them (195, 1024, 118, 148, 230) are catapults.

This is probably a much higher percentage of catapults than in the general robot population.

[asid61]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

A very good team, given enough iteration and development time, can make almost any design competitive.

However, I think it's pretty clear that catapults were the way to go this year, in retrospect, unless you really needed the packaging benefits of a wheeled shooter. Catapults could more easily shoot consistently and could more easily be built to shoot over a defender from the outer works.

A few things that wheeled shooters have over catapults:
-Ball protection
-Turrets
-Ability to be on an arm
-Familiar (2012)

Catapults definitely have consistency among other benefits, but I disagree that it's cut-and-dry catapults over wheels.

[Bluman56]

Originally Posted by asid61

A few things that wheeled shooters have over catapults:
-Ball protection
-Turrets
-Ability to be on an arm
-Familiar (2012)

Catapults definitely have consistency among other benefits, but I disagree that it's cut-and-dry catapults over wheels.

Catapults can definitely be on an arm

[MaGiC_PiKaChU]

Originally Posted by Bluman56

Catapults can definitely be on an arm

Seconded

[asid61]

Originally Posted by Bluman56

Catapults can definitely be on an arm

Originally Posted by MaGiC_PiKaChU

Seconded

I guess I stand corrected.
I completely forgot about your bots, despite seeing videos of 3360 at least.