Washington Practice Event and Robot Showcase

[Rick TYler]

Once again, Titan Robotics Club (Team 492) hosted the Western Washington practice event. Eight teams (if my count was right) attended and ran matches for three hours. The great thing about only having eight teams there was that everyone had plenty of opportunity to try out their robots. Here are some of my observations:

1. This year called for complex mechanisms. Only two of the eight robots were completely ready for prime time.

2. Low goal bots scored a lot more points than shooters.

3. Shooters have about two seconds to get off a shot before a defender will post up on them. The arena is small, and the bots are fast.

4. EVERY bot at the practice event had six wheel drive. IIRC, two used Skyway KOP wheels, four used Beadlok 9x2s, one used two IFI traction wheels with four KOP Skyways, and one used pneumatics. They all worked well, except for one rookie team that spun their wheels a lot.

5. Titan Robotics shares a mentor with Bellevue HS team 949. They share a common chassis, with different game systems. Another team also copied the TRC chassis (TRC shares everything with everyone in the PNW area -- they are a class act). We felt like we were competing with the clone brigade. Last year, TRC pushed us around the arena in Portland like we had skateboard wheels under us. At today's event, we went nose-to-nose with one of the TRC clones and pushed them backwards (with a 180 limit on our PWMs, too). This may not mean much to all of you, but it was a major breakthrough in our team's history. (Our founding mentor came from 949 three years ago. It's a small world...)

6. Although a few bots had cameras installed, no one used them at the practice event.

7. Expect LOTS of contact. It was much more physical than last year.

8. High CG didn't seem to affect the robots much. Everyone could climb the ramps, including the robots with KOP Skyway wheels. Only one match ended with three robots on the platform. Top Gun climbed the ramp like it wasn't there -- including backwards at an angle which the drivers were told not to attempt.

9. There were balls everywhere on the field. The fairly low success rate of the shooters meant that the low-goal-scoring carpet-sweepers dominated scoring. If you have to eliminate either your shooter or your dumper to make weight -- keep the dumper and dump the shooter.

10. A rookie team (I think it was 1778 from Mountlake HS) had the most creative game mechanism at the event. The had a chute that could be pivoted from the floor up to a 45 degree angle. It sucked balls in, shot them into the low goal, and shot up into the high goal. Combined with a clever spiral hopper that could hold 15 or 20 balls, they won the Rick Tyler Clever Engineering Solution Award. On the Top Gun rating system, they get four pairs of aviator sunglasses.

11. TRC used the wide plastic film normally used to wrap pallets to make their hopper. It rooled. A simple PVC frame wrapped with plastic film gave them a ball hopper that weighed about nothing and a half. It was clever, cheap and practical. They hinted that they might use a tinted film for the PNW tournament.

12. In an early match, a rookie team had their whole hopper fall off, and get dragged around the field by their radio cable. Scary.

13. Make your sweeper work better. Sweepers rooled.

14. It turns out it wasn't hard for the human players to score into the low goals. Once they got the hang of it, our HPs scored 10 or 15 points a match this way.

15. It was easier to understand than tetras, but still not a slam dunk to follow. The referees (volunteers) had trouble remembering which was "the blue end" and which was "the red end." I suspect the tournament will be smoother than our practice event.

16. Never let your programmer load code while the robot is sitting in the starting box. *sigh*

I'm looking forward to reading other action reports of this weekend's practice matches.