First Week Regionals *Merged*

[Petey]

Didn't see any robots cap during autonomous at Granite State. Only three or four really capable teams, from what I saw.

Our team had a lot of troubles holding onto the tetras. Did anyone else find them inordinately slippery?

Pits were wacky--lots of people scrambling to get their stuff done, even more than usual.

Also, matches are very boring to watch, unlike last year.

--Petey

[sanddrag]

I want to know:

Has anyone gotten (or even though about getting) the 10 pts for all three in the end zone?

Does anyone "contain" tetras as opposed to stacking them?

How many rows are usually made?

[Collmandoman]

we should start a chatroom.. because this Q&A response thing is slow~ and ther eis alot of excitement out there~

so I'll make one

name

"FIRST Regionals" on AIM

come if you can -- hit yourself if you can't

[Goobergunch]

There's also the Tigerbolt IRC chatroom on IRC - there's an IRC link in my sig and a Java applet here.

[Tom Bishop]

I was a field resetter at Peachtree, and had a good view of the competition Friday and Sat.

Auto/Human Loader
Human loading was more popular, but auto loading was used. Picking tetras off the ground was used a lot too.

Stack High vs. Stack Fast
Stacking high could work if you where left alone, but it was easy to disrupt stacking bu pushing or using the arm to knock the tetras off the opposing robots arm, so fast was an advantage. What was a greater advantage was being able to hold onto a tetra while turning, getting bumped and so on without dropping it.

Strong/Fast Bots
Being strong was important. Not only to push other bots around but to keep from being pushed while capping.

Autonomous Mode
No teams were able to stack a vision tetra in autonomous mode. Only a few even had the camera on their bot.

6 Robots on the field
The field was big enough for six bots. Plenty of manuvering room.

What happened vs what you planned
Our strategy is to cap fast and then to play defence. We could cap fast and then prevent slower teams from capping by removing there tetras from the arm of the opposing bot wirh our arm or just pushing them until it fell off. Our alliances scored from 3-40+ points depending on how much of a shove match it came down too.

Robot Damage
At first (early Friday) damage was light. As you might expect it got more severe toward the end of qualifying and definitely in the elimination rounds.

Scores
Really low scores 0-10 were rare for winning teams. Most scores where in the 20-30 points range. 40+ was not the norm but not rare. 50+ was rare. Number 1 seeds quality points averaged 12. Penalties where responsible for the low quality point averages.


How fast is the setup/take down of every match
At Peachtree we finished ahead of schedule on Friday. The event was well run and were really smoooth. We had a great crew of volunteers and IFI had very little in the way of problems. It was a great event.

[Andy A.]

I was surprised, among many things, at how often tetras did not seat on goals, and remained unscored.

I noticed a good deal of tipping over, which I guess we all saw coming, but still is a little worrisome. I hope full matches will be different. Seeing a bot on it's side is just a shame.

Getting all the teams back in the end zone may not be as difficult as I had once thought. A lot of teams seem to be undersized. This may become an important factor in alliance selections.

It seemed to me that many teams were picking tetras up easily enough, but having more difficulty holding onto them.

Auto mode seems like another year of 15 seconds of boredom. Maybe that will change, but I doubt its going to get a whole lot better. Knocking the hanging tets off is to easy, and capping a vision tet seems like it's way to hard. The most effective move I've seen involved stacking a starting tetra onto one of the side goals hard enough to drop the hanging tetra. 4 points.

-Andy A