pic: 190 Cool Robot Trick

[ColleenShaver]

Although that is exactly what our robot was designed to do, we never ended up doing it in competition. Typically, by the time someone would put the ball on the goal, we had just enough time to block them from scoring, not let them drop and then transfer. We almost had it once at the Canada Off-season where our operator picked the ball off the floor in front of us (while hanging) then brought it all the way over, but we just didn't have enough time to complete the move.

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And just for interest's sake, if anyone has any in it... it would make sense that people would place big balls late in the match, especially if they know you can defend, so the truth is we figured that and that's not why the arm is so capable. Our original autonomous strategy was to grab the big ball in autonomous as we were beginning to hang and place it on the opponent's goal ahead of us before the 15 seconds was out and HPs could begin shooting for goal-tending penalties. We figured we could easily keep that ball covering their goal and blocking points because anytime the opponents touched it to remove the ball, we could grab on and keep it there (since when a robot is touching/holding the ball it's considered an extension of their robot and therefore the ball would become an extension of both our robots and then there could be no penalty for goal-tending). We figured then in the last 15 seconds or so we could grab the ball and dump it on our goal if we needed the extra points to win.

Unfortunately 15 seconds seems a lot longer when you do the math than how fast the robot can really do it... plus, without a full size field to simulate on, getting an autonomous hang was great feat enough for our awesome controls/programming group!