First Week Regionals *Merged*

[kaszeta]

Originally Posted by Spikey

I am curious as to how robots performed during the practice matches today. Were any teams able to cap the vision tetras? How was the autonomous period? Was there a lot, or very little capping? How well were robots holding up? Did you see anything truly amazing?

My overall comments based upon the Manchester pits:

1. Overall, bot design is *very* similar this year (i.e. most bots are near-indentical in design).

2. Not much (yet) in useful autonomous mode, mostly knocking hanging tetras down and (if started with a tetra) capping a tetra. (Our team is no exception, we're still debugging).

3. Very few teams are using the camera. I only saw one team that could do something useful with it. Dead-reckoning autonomous seems more prevalent, and some teams are doing quite well.

4. Some very good cappers out there, but few that can cap center goal once more than 1 or 2 tetras are up there (our bot can do it, but it's on the very top end of our range). Many tetra-handling arms are wobbly, and a lot of arms are dropping tetras. A lot of teams seem to be having trouble with fine control of the bot arm (our bot has a left-right pivoting hip on our arm to allow finer control, surprised we haven't seen more of that sort of thing).

5. Weight and dimensions aren't a huge issue this year, most teams are well underweight and within the box.

6. Pits seem more relaxed, and teams better prepared (but maybe that's just because our own pit area is more relaxed)

From our own team, we're happy with how the bot is driving, but have lots of little niggling details that we need tinker with (like the limit switch that didn't work...)

Should be some fun matches tomorrow, especially because a lot of teams will be fairly well-matched (at least technologically, driver skill is a huge issue).

Rich the coach, who enjoys being close enough to Manchester that I can sleep at home...