Catapult vs Wheeled Shooter

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by backdrive

I find it interesting how certain shooter designs this year seemed to be vary by region- for example, Texas has a bunch of amazing catapult robots (118, 148, 2848, 4587), but California, in contrast had no top-tier catapult bots (correct me if I'm wrong), with nearly all the top teams (254, 1678, 971, 973, etc) opting for flywheel shooters.

We know how to build, tune, and debug a wheeled shooter, and they've been good to us in the past. We don't know how to build, tune, and debug a catapult. We could probably figure it out, but early prototyping showed that a wheeled shooter could get us the performance we wanted, so why do something else?

I am guessing that many of the Texas teams had the exact opposite experience.

[hank2247]

Our prototype phase took way too long this year parly because we were trying to decide between the two. We ended up using a wheeled shooter because it was more consistent than our catapult prototype and it let us build a 2 axis shooter that fit under the low bar.
Definitely the coolest shooting mechanism our team has ever built!!

[Clayton Summerall]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

We know how to build, tune, and debug a wheeled shooter, and they've been good to us in the past. We don't know how to build, tune, and debug a catapult. We could probably figure it out, but early prototyping showed that a wheeled shooter could get us the performance we wanted, so why do something else?

I am guessing that many of the Texas teams had the exact opposite experience.

We had tried a wheeled shooter and didn't like the space requirement. Not much experience with either.

[domi]

I agree with Citrus, wheedle shooters are better to track and there is better control of speed and trajectory. Catapults are cool but, they easy to use because you have to think about the speed or rotation of the motor. Then after dealing with that, then you about vision tracking which is a problem because it will be 100 percent so there is a lot to deal with. But, at the end of the day, it's down to which one you are familiar with or comfortable with.