Was the Low Bar worth it?

[Anthony Galea]

This is a hard question for me. Knowing what I know now about our team's performance (3rd district win but no MSC), I feel like if we were a low bot we would have stood a much better chance at making MSC. At our first district, we had a lot of trouble getting over defenses due to our suboptimal CoG and the inexperience with getting over the metal defenses instead of the wooden ones (for some reason the wood defenses felt easier to cross).

As the season went on, we got better at the defenses, but we still had somewhat of a tipping problem (tipped twice at Southfield, tipped twice at Woodhaven, one being in the finals although we still won the match). If we would have designed to be a low breaching bot who could score low, I don't doubt that we would have seeded higher and have a much better chance at getting to MSC and potentially Champs.
However, I don't believe we would have won any of our events if we went low.

Its a hard question, but I think if you asked me to go build a new robot today, I think I would go high, but definitely go with a different design that allowed for the shooter to speed up while aligning to shoot, and have a lower CoG.

[qscgy]

For us, I would say yes. First of all, we decided against a high shooter because it would have required vision code, which we didn't know how to do and didn't think there would be enough time to test. (There wasn't.) Since we were a breacher/low shooter, we didn't really need to be tall. Instead, we needed a fast cycle time, which the low bar provided. Having a low CG also made it easier to go fast over defenses without worrying about tipping. The only downside for us was that our robot was shorter than the metal on the sides of the field, allowing our robot to escape the field due to a bug in auto and broken e-stops.

[Lil' Lavery]

We removed the capability to fit underneath the low bar from our machine for our final three matches at Championship, in favor of a 53.875" high shot blocker. In that sense, the answer might be "no."

However, for the strategy we selected, I do feel it was worth it. In our first couple meetings, we pegged down that we wanted to play for the bonus ranking points. We play in the district system, and your qualification standings are a big factor in your district points. Getting into the top 8 is essentially a double pay-off, since you not only get points for your seeding, but also guarantee yourself alliance captain points. Based on this, we established that we wanted to virtually guarantee breaches and help as much as we could towards a capture. Based on this, we determined that crossing categories A, B, and D were absolute requirements, and we would design in the capability to either cross under the low bar or open category C. Ultimately, we ended up with a low bar capable machine.

Part of the reason we selected the low bar was for autonomous. It was the only defense we absolutely knew the position of. Further still, it required no active manipulation to pass. Based on this, we determined it would give us the best odds of completing an autonomous low goal. While we did eventually end up scoring from position 4 (Ramparts) as well, that assumption did prove correct, as the low bar routine was our most consistent autonomous in terms of scoring (albeit, still far from 100%).

Ultimately, I think our strategy paid off. Although some early season technical issues almost prevented us from reaching DCMP (which is something we feel we should accomplish every season), we eventually accrued enough points to earn one of MAR's point spots in St. Louis. Our seeding actually improved at each of our four events, to the point where we seeded 8th and captained the 6th alliance on Hopper. We can't quite boast the gaudy 7 or 8 low goals per match of some of the elite low goal machines, but we were very consistent at 5 goals/match at Championship (a couple times 6), and did so while crossing a variety of defenses to ensure breaches, rather than cycling over one. If we had more practice cycling across the low bar, we may have been able to put up a higher max score (although having to both articulate our intake and turn around to cycle would have slowed us some). Being able to consistently score 50% of the capture balls and complete breaches proved to be a massive aid in seeding high at both DCMP and CMP, and we ended up as alliance captains at both.

Had we been from a regional structure, our strategy decision may have landed elsewhere. Another one of the roles we considered was a "sweeper" that attempted to stay forwards and score boulders in the high goal. If we didn't care as much about qualifications rankings, we may have selected this (though, one of our reasons for shying away from this is we didn't feel we could build as reliable a sweeper machine as top tier teams).

[Ben Martin]

I could go either way with this one.

It was nice to have insurance for if we wanted to pair with a non-low bar shooter in elims and play a taller defense bot at the same time, which we took advantage of twice.

[JamesTerm]

I like the transformer idea... once again I'm impressed with what 67 did... reminds me of their 2012 bot where they make use of existing material for multiple functions! Low bar has advantage of less wear and tear from the defenses. I personally would have designed a rocker and bogie to minimize wear and tear.... but that's just me.

[Kingland093]

Since we decided only to score low goals, the low bar was totally worth it.
If we decided to go for the high goal, personally I would rather be tall

[xjschwen]

We specialized in breaching LB and had 6 inches of ground clearance which meant that sally/bridge were the only ones we could not cross without help.

Then with some practice and the spin move we could do the sallyport without help leaving only the drawbridge which was not put out very often.

In week 1 that got us #2 seed. By week 5 we were second pick of #6 seed... but that took us to the finals and a trip to MFC.

In our early design meetings we choose to start low bar capable we felt the it would be easy to grow taller after our first event if we wanted. But getting shorter would have been very near impossible.

[maxnz]

We decided to be low bar capable, AND be able to clear the rock wall without bottoming out (we used 4 wheels). That left us with approx. 10" of height to work with. In the end it worked out fine, but some parts could have been a little better with the extra space (such as the electronics boards*).

*we had to split up the electronics board into two main parts: a top part with the PDP, drivetrain motor controllers, 120 Amp breaker and radio; and the bottom part with the RoboRio, VRM, and two motor controllers for our arm. And both with wires organized/zip tied down/etc. to my best ability.

[Bkeeneykid]

My opinion is very mixed. I think it was a great learning experience for our team, going through several design creator we designed around, and we came up with a design that I think most of us are happy with. Me, as the Electrical lead was pissed when they told me "Oh, those victors you put on there, yeah those won't work. You are about an 1/4 in too tall. How do you fell about rewiring all of our motor controllers with those shiny new Talon SRXs? Awesome. Oh, and Stop Build is two days away." Programming wasn't happy either. We had to cut a lot of stuff out, including our climber which someone spent a lot of time on. I agree with Sperkowsky that the ability to be able to transport the robot in a regular car was a major advantage for us, and we've already done two outreach events because of it. We did none last year.

In short:
Pros:
-Outreach events are easier
-Awesome design challenge and experience
Cons:
-Our robot looked like literally everyone else's at our comps
-Design challenge was probably a little bit too hard for our experience
-Easier breaching, but too focused on breaching, our low goal scorer (not really a shooter) really sucked.

[jijiglobe]

694 is very happy about choosing not to go under the low bar. We originally intended to try for low bar, but we quickly abandoned that idea during our CAD marathon when we realized that our design just wouldn't fit.

We knew from the get-go that having a low-bar capable robot is an absolute necessity for eliminations, but we didn't realize quite how ubiquitous low bar capability would be. By building a tall robot with a really fast drivetrain, we were able to breach extremely consistently. If you forget about South Florida regional (which we so dearly wish to forget), we were able to breach every match that our robot was working (and some matches that it wasn't).

We also realize, however, that we are the outlier in our success, particularly in that we were a #8 seed alliance on Einstein. Being able to go under the low-bar and score low goals is huge in qualifications, as it opens the door for captures much more frequently than would otherwise be possible. Seeding first is also hugely valuable towards winning events.

TLDR:

The ubiquity of low bar robots made it easy to get the advantages of low-bar for both qualifications and eliminations. In a world where low bar was more rare, low bar robots would completely dominate because having at least one low-bar bot is basically mandatory for a strong alliance.

[OccamzRazor]

Absolutely worth it. We stayed low, never got a single tortuga after 5 events, and successfully accomplished every single challenge of the game with the exception of the drawbridge with one robot. We got our high goal shooter dialed in at champs but quickly realized that it was too late and that other teams in our division were still faster than us. We even successfully cheesecaked our tiny climber for two other teams.

What worked in NC simply did not work at Championships. We were prepared for that until our climber gearbox broke on us after 3 competitions and we missed climbing for three or four matches. I believe if we had spent more time on our high goal shooter capability we would have been more competitive at the big show.