Shooters

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by thefro526

After seeing video of midwest and being in NJ driving I found that it is not necessarily shooting the ball but the ability to hurdle without stopping. The only real shooters in NJ were 103 and 25 but a couple of robots like 694 and 293 we able to lift the ball up and hurdle it without stopping. I believe team 33? had a similar capability to 293 where the top of the gripper folded down so the robot could go under the overpass without stopping.

The other big stopping point (which is just as important as stopping after hurdling) is the ability to corral the ball after hurdling. It doesn't matter if you have a fantastic full-speed shooter if it takes you 20 seconds to regain control of the ball afterwards. An arm bot with fantastic picking-up abilities will beat a shooter bot who can't load consistently.

Actually, I would argue that pickup is MORE important than hurdling. A good arm bot is only stopped for 5ish seconds following a hurdle while the arm retracts. However, the difference between 1114 and the field was that they could get the ball back under control almost immediately upon reaching it, while other teams were less good at that. The amount of time you lose with a poor pickup is almost certainly greater than the time lost even with the slowest of arm-retractions. I noticed 25 had issues on occasion with poor picking-up and it seemed to hurt their scoring abilities in the qualifying matches.