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.