auto vs. manual loading zone, which one?

[shyra1353]

We can use either human or auto. However we prefer auto because that was how our driver practiced throughout the season and we never did any official training for our human player.

[Jack Jones]

Originally Posted by Liz C

My questions are
which one did your team use the most and why?
also, if anyone had omni, or "wonder", wheels in the front, did you encounter the problem of getting onto the zone?

Over the course of two regionals, with two quarter-finals, and a semi-final, our human players never left the mat. They really did a great job; never got a single human player penalty.

We decided early on to go with speed versus quantity. Human player loading was just too slow. OTOH, the autoloader was always loaded and ready for us to snatch a tetra, or we'd simply snatch one off the floor.

Robots that carried multiple tetras, on the other hand, almost always needed the human to stack them on. We decided against that for a number of reasons. The first was that as the opponents were much more likely to defend against a stacked robot. The second was that in the same amount of time it took them to load and deliver four or five tetras to one or two goals, we could deliver four or five tetras to four or five goals. And finally was the dreaded disablement if the HP accidentally touched the robot or a loaded tetra.

[cbolin]

Hi,
We used human loading station exclusively for the following reasons.
1. Our human player is 6' 3" and can place the top of a tetra about 7' in the air onto the end of our robot arm.
2. The robot arm is elevated about 54 degrees(at start) which is the angle we use for stacking a tetra and it is extended about 10 feet.

So, human player loads the tetra, driver turns robot to goal, extends arm to necessary length and decreases the elevation to set the tetra down.

Now, in order to pickup an autoloader tetra, the arm needs to come down to about 5 degrees which takes about 10 seconds. So thats 10 seconds down, grab tetra, 10 seconds up....wastes a lot of time.

Regards,
Chuck

[xzvrw2]

see we can sit here and argue back and forth which one is better but in the end it's what one your robot can do the best. i have seen a lot of great robots that use the HP all the time then the other great robots use the auto loader all the time. it all depends on strategy and how your robot was built.

[Kit Gerhart]

We can pick up two tetras much quicker from the "auto loader" so that is what we usually use. Also, we can, and do use the auto loader during autonomous, while the HP is not available. We sometimes use the human player when it is convenient to do so, and we like to give Maia, our very good human player, something to do once in a while.

[Scythe]

I honestly don't think our use of the HPZ zone is at all detrimental, in fact, I think it's an advantage. I estimate that our time in the zone on average is about 7 seconds. Where as most teams take a bit longer at the AZ. We can do this consistantly at around the same speed, and so far, without a single HP penalty I'm happy to say.

[sw293]

We use the manual loader, because it's better. All the best teams that I have seen prefer the manual loader. But the auto loader has its advantages in the elimination rounds.

During the seeding rounds, using the auto loader heavily tends to be a disadvantage to most teams that do it. It is usually either slower or more risky, and tends to have a higher rate of failure in obtaining a tetra.

However, for the elimination rounds, in which efficient offense is king, three good robots can't all use the human load zone efficiently, especially when they have to cap goals on the auto loader side. So in alliance selection, team 293 looks to choose one robot that can use the auto loader or pick tetras off the ground.

When we picked in Philly, we chose 358 with our first pick, who mostly used the human loader. Our second pick was 834, because they could use the auto loader and pick tetras off the ground. We actually had them ranked 5th (I believe) on our pick sheet, even though they were in 35th place overall and there were several bots with better capping averages. Our alliance was one of the best coordinated I've ever seen. We beat the 8 seed in two games, then the one seed in two games, and we came close to winning the regional.

[Ianworld]

My team has stuck almost completely to the Human Loading station. We have the capability to use the auto loading station, but in terms of reliability and speed the human loading station is just faster.

I'm pretty sure my team had one of the faster human players in FIRST. I was going through some of my teams video of our last regional and counted how long it took for him to load a tetra on. He averaged about 1.3 seconds from when the robot shut off to when the robot was re-enabled. We nicknamed him the blur.

Now that being said, I do think going to the auto loading station is useful. My team has devised a method that we think will work and ease our picking up of tetras at the auto-loaders. (namely ramming the wall to make sure we're straight ).

Either way, I present The Blur:

[xzvrw2]

Originally Posted by Scythe

I honestly don't think our use of the HPZ zone is at all detrimental, in fact, I think it's an advantage. I estimate that our time in the zone on average is about 7 seconds. Where as most teams take a bit longer at the AZ. We can do this consistantly at around the same speed, and so far, without a single HP penalty I'm happy to say.

ok it all depends on the robot if the human loader is faster. i remember once in Midwest we picked up a tetra from the auto zone drove over to our home middle goal and scored it in 7 seconds. while some of the great teams love the human zone (71and 648 off the top of my just woke up head) there is other great teams that go to the auto zone and do it so much faster then the human zone. if the team is like us, can drive to the auto zone,pick up the tetra, dive to the goal, and score it in 7 seconds, and it takes a human player 7 seconds to run to the robot, place the tetra and run back, then i think that the auto loader zone is way better. the auto loader zone has almost no penalties for your team also. the human player has a 10 pointer, a 30 pointer, a penalty that can disable your robot. in my opinion the bad out weigh the good for the human player zone.


Steve

[suneel112]

Back in the first week (design week), the requirement for all designs was that it could auto-load. eventually, we came up with a robot that is only good at auto-loading. It turns out that human player loading was more important that I though, and that auto-loading really wasn't worth it.

There is a theoretical time advantage to auto-loading, but usually it takes a few tries to actually load a tetra, like sticking the arm out, pulling it back, turning slightly, and sticking the arm out again. With human player loading, you go to the zone, and the human player runs up and places a tetra on the goal. It is very painless since people are smarter than robots.

[nightrenegade00]

Originally Posted by Ianworld

My team has stuck almost completely to the Human Loading station. We have the capability to use the auto loading station, but in terms of reliability and speed the human loading station is just faster.

I'm pretty sure my team had one of the faster human players in FIRST. I was going through some of my teams video of our last regional and counted how long it took for him to load a tetra on. He averaged about 1.3 seconds from when the robot shut off to when the robot was re-enabled. We nicknamed him the blur.

Either way, I present The Blur:

Well we use the same type of strategy. Ever since the UTC Scrimmage we have never used the auto zone. After making the necessary adjustments we now only use the human player zone. We have 2 human players one known as Crash (me) officially announced @ UTC NE Regional and Flash. There r pictures of both of us on here but this is only the pic of Flash. Its more blurry .

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pi...&quiet=Verbose

1.3 seems a little unrealistic. You must have only timed him without loading a tetra. I can load 3 tetras on our robot in under 15 seconds in game situation. (not meaning to brag). to get a more accurate time you should set up in a game situation and then have him load.

-Crash

[Liz C]

Essentially, for us, this did work out as a point of precision, but it really depended on the robot for other teams. I was just trying to get an idea of who was doing what.

In concern to the omni wheels, if anyone saw my safety glasses at atlanta, there was a sensor attached to a piece of aluminum near the front part of the chassis, that when raised to the height of the piece of wood used for the auto loader triangle (I think it ended up being 1/4 inch), would make an LED attached to my glasses go on (it was plugged into the control panel), so I didn't have to worry about getting the actual omni wheels on the zone or risk penalty points for not being on it. A mentor on out team came up with the idea - it was quite helpful!

[geeknerd99]

401 has a turret, and coming out of our autonomous mode, we are facing forward, and our arm is more or less sideways. Also, with the parallel arms down, we can get almost right up against the wall. So, when we had control of the robot, we would drive alongside to the station, and just raise the elevator and then immediately have a tetra.

The turret allowed us to load from any angle. We even loaded one as we backed into the loading zone, which was pretty cool.

[ChrisH]

We used which ever one was most convenient for whatever we wanted to do next. Though in the Finals we used mostly the HP to stay out of our partner's way.

[xzvrw2]

If you noticed on Einstein feild, there were two robots for the auto loader and one for the human loader on each alliance. That proved that teams would rather go to the auto loader. And if you noticed how many tetras were up in those matches, that would not have been possible if they were all using the human loader.


Stevie