Types of Robots for 2004

[Bill Gold]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

yes i was

And blocking the view isnt illegal, niether is blocking the ball deposits

Actually, blocking your opponent's view is illegal. It was answered on the FIRST Q/A page.

Section: 4.4.3 Date Posted: 1/11/2004 Status: Answered
Q: Will it be permissible to intentionally block the opposition's view of the playing field for the obvious reason of limiting their ability to operate their robots?
A: No. This violates gracious professionalism.


Also, it was answered that 1 robot can only block 1 ball chute at a time.

Section: 4.1 Date Posted: 1/10/2004 Status: Answered
Q: How many of the doggy doors which let the robot push balls to the human player are open at a time, and can we block them?
A: The "doggy doors" are open cutouts aka Ball Chutes in the diamond plate so they are always open. Regarding blocking of the Ball Chutes, please refer to new Rule <G26>... 1 robot can only block 1 Ball Chute of the opposing alliance at a time.

[Sachiel7]

Some guys have quite a long list out there...

Here's ours:
-Un/Re Capping Movable goals
-Grabbing movable goals
-Herding balls

We're working on having our capping mechanism (as a bonus) be able to pick up a capped ball off the ground.
We're avoiding the Bar, platforms entirely. This year one of our main devices functions as both a good offence and defence device. It herds balls, but also provides a great way of blocking anything. So, you'll see us on offence and defence.
Our auto mode that we have planned (thus far) will be a set of optional actions.
We're going to have a switch panel on our bot for functions, such as:
| BONUSBALL | GOAL | UNCAP | HERD | BRING TO STATION | BRING TO DUMP |
YES
NO

and so forth. It is built up of preset movement data for each individual function, and references each one based on the switch settings. We found that passing a set of drive values to the PWMs without error checking worked really good last year (suprisingly) and should work even better this year with auto mode being more straight shot. So, one match we could talk with our alliance partner to see if they know they'll get the bonus ball(s). If so, we can zip down and position our goal under the ball dump (it is legal, check the team update) or bring it back to our station, to dump balls over into it. But I think our main auto mode will go something like this:
-Knock over both alliances bonus balls
-Grab and uncap goal
-Open Herding device (on the back of our bot) and back up to the driver station, pushing a few balls on the ground into the corral

Our bot will also be able to "huddle" a goal within a corner of the field, fully protected. With a grip on the capping ball, it won't get knocked off. Since we're not going for the bar, we can save the last few seconds for letting go of our capping ball/goal. We also plan to play defence against hanging bots getting on the platform if we need to.