Shooters

[hipsterjr]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

I believe I was trying to make the same point as you?

I just dont think saying "Oh man look only 2/5 regionals were won by shooters in week one! Arms must be the best!!!11!!!" is a very smart thing to do. Its week 1... things change.

Right now I think it is hard to compare arm and shoot stats. Arms out number shooters almost 4 to 1. If there were equal number of shooters and arms, imho, regional finals would be filled with mostly shooters. But there isn't. So while shooters may not "vastly dominate", they will be greatly valuable to any alliance.

[jfc358]

Originally Posted by Bongle

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.

I agree completely with your point that being able to pickup the ball quickly is more important than being a great hurdler. This will become even more so, as defensive strategies develop in upcoming regionals. For instance, will we see more "deny the opponent the ball" strategies as we move toward Atlanta? A fast arm bot should be able to effectively slow down a great shooter if their pickup is not flawless.

I saw several instances in the NJ regional where the ball was pushed or was stopped on the trailing line of one of the quadrants. 25 was unable to pick up the ball in this case, and if they tried the would run the risk of a line violation penalty. They were fast enough that the could zip around the track and get to a track ball and score, but this cost them valuable time. In the end it didn't matter as they won the regional for the 3rd? year in a row, but I didn't witness any teams really trying to stop them.

I know this game was introduced as a "coopertition", and I think that great defense may be one of those cooperative skills we haven't yet seen. As usual, in the early regionals most teams go with what they designed their robots to do. In this game that means either running laps and/or hurtling, but with only two track balls, how many great hurdlers do you need on an alliance? I think the role of the third pick in the elimination rounds will become more focused on defense and endgame capabilities. Of course a great hybrid mode won't hurt.

[sgreco]

I agree that maybe saying "shooters dominate" was a little bit of an exaggeration. A point was brought up that all the good shooters were very accomplished teams, but I have seen accomplished teams with elevators. From what I observed they can put up a fight against the shooters, but I think more often than not the shooters will win.
From what I've seen it's hard to find many elevators(by accomplished teams or not) that can stack up against shooters like 103, 25, 16, 1024, 1625, 71 and 1114.

[J@GMFlint]

A couple comments on pick-up. From what we experienced and saw between arms & shooters, pick-up probably made the biggest difference between the good and best hurdlers, particularly being able to pick-up in traffic and from the #1 driver station looking through the reflection/glare from the divider.

At MWR, the divider reflection was very challenging- (our base driver who had never driven, or even been to an event before for that matter) initially had a lot of trouble losing sight of the robot. Eventually she settled in and we talked her in but having a claw gripper made it tougher than we would have liked. Whereas the roller feeder robots could just slam into the general area and more easily drive towards the ball and either grab it or drive it to where it could be seen and then grabbed & hurdled. During elims we had a lot of front row opportunities to watch 1114 do this handling very-very effectively. (Great job guys!!)

Before you can hurdle or place the ball, you have to be able to get the ball!! We're be looking at possibly upgrading or revising our gripper prior to West Michigan.

Regarding our arm. We were happy it performed as well as it did, but agreed it needs to be faster- we used the van door motor for the arm and globe for the wrist- Making the 180 deg. swing front & back took more time than we liked and required more anticipation on the arm drivers part to be ready to grab, but again it functioned when needed and we saw a lot of teams successfully using the VDM on their arms.

The wrist was another story though. The globe motor was fine until it got hot, it took a while for us to figure this out very late Friday by then it was too late to do much about it besides replace it and plan for the next event. We'd do fine the first couple matches and practice (we actually made it out for practice match #1- a big accomplishment for us, especially at the 1st event of the season ) but then as the pace picked up the performance was sketchy and we couldn't figure out what happened until it finally outright failed.

On Elevators, (btw: Wildstang, 1504 and one of the Winners- sorry I forget their name right now, were Elevator robots as was Team #33 I believe.) The biggest challenges we saw were them getting caught up on the overpass, and in many cases high CG tipping when loaded with a raised ball in traffic, or again hitting the over pass, hanging up or close-lined. Also, air consumption of larger cylinders used on some robots often meant that tactical adjustments had to be made to allow for recharging the air systems between hurdle attempts. All of which were manageable and less of a challenge as the event went on.

As always though, it comes down to robot capability, field tactics, and simple execution out there, especially in the elims. Every type of robot can play this game and play it well once they align their tactics and strategy with their capabilities and execute their plan.

Biggest word of advice to all teams: Watch the penalties!! With all the action going on especially when chasing hurdled balls in traffic jams, the refs can't always tell if you broke a plan on purpose or were pushed so for consistency it seems they typically hit you anytime the robot broke a plane- unless it was very obvious.

[Springman]

The Thunder Chickens (217) were amazing at St. Louis this weekend. They managed to hurdle (5) times in just about every match that I saw. That statistic may not be reflected in our actual scouting, but that's just what I saw. They could hurdle just as fast as any of the shooters given all of the different things that have to take place to hurdle a ball. There PVC mechanism for picking up the ball was very reliable and there drivetrain was flat out FAST and controlled. Even with the arm, they will be very competitive wherever they go.