Shooter vs Dumper Trade Study

[sdcantrell56]

Originally Posted by kc2pix

Our team has a powered dumper. It has a tray with a slanted bottom, (like paint roller tray shaped) and the back wall moves forward to launch the balls forward. We can launch several balls at a time, into a trailer that we don't need to be directly up against. The balls come up through a trap door in the front of the tray. The only problem we had was that balls kept falling over the edge.

We were very proud of our design.

The purpose of this thread is to decide which is better, although IMO there is not one better design. So along these lines how many balls can your system make per dump and how accurate is it. A lot of dumpers that tilt that I have seen, miss a vast majority of balls which makes there high capacity pretty worthless. I am also not a fan of relying on gravity to move things quickly.

[swamp_child]

Originally Posted by sdcantrell56

The purpose of this thread is to decide which is better, although IMO there is not one better design. So along these lines how many balls can your system make per dump and how accurate is it. A lot of dumpers that tilt that I have seen, miss a vast majority of balls which makes there high capacity pretty worthless. I am also not a fan of relying on gravity to move things quickly.

based on what I saw at Fl, we averaged more balls per match than almost any other team. That being said i think the best mechanism is a power dumper like 1625 or 1649 or a ? shape like 190 or 79

[sdcantrell56]

I know at peachtree we averaged the most balls per match, and we were a turreted short range shooter. We are capable of 4-6 balls/second though so we're not exactly a slow shooter. We really used our robot like an aimable dumper the whole time since we never got the tracking to work with the lighting. It also helped that we had fans to chase down anyone. I know based off of some preliminary statistics, we have one of the highest average match scores in the country (82).

[Aren_Hill]

May i inquire as to what your average balls per match was? (1771)

[sdcantrell56]

Im not quite sure Aren. I believe average was probably between 15 and 25 for the robot plus 10 for the human player.

The point average was 82

[cziggy343]

Originally Posted by sdcantrell56

I know based off of some preliminary statistics, we have one of the highest average match scores in the country (82).

keep in mind also that you had a lot of help with the schedule in quals. im in no way denying that you had a great robot, b/c you did, but the 82 points was not all yours. for example... our average points per match was 56, but we personally scored (guessing) anywhere between 15-25 rocks each match.

i also agree with paul though. it's scary how many upsets that i have seen this year. at peachtree, the finals consisted of the #7 seed vs. the #8 seed with the #8 seed winning. this proves that what kind of robot you have does not matter as much as the percision at which you execute your strategy.

[gorrilla]

we're about to change our shooter into a high speed dumper before atlanta....

probobly gonig to just mount a plate in-front of our shooter...

and speed up our STOD...

[JesseK]

Heh, a definite revamp of our moonrock output mechanism is in order for us before Atlanta. I would say that gravity feeding is plenty fast, so long as the balls do not jam themselves up. It's not as fast as, say, 2 FP's geared properly but it sure is a lot less weight. Also, it seems that shooters that fire downward seem to do better than arched or horizontal shooters.

Hmm, I strongly disagree with Paul regarding the small things when it comes to Qualification matches. Strategy execution in qualifications is too dependent upon luck and the alliance partners... sure one's own team can execute but perhaps the alliance partners simply can't do what Paul has described. I can only speak from my own experience on the field.

Many times at regionals, our alliance simply couldn't match our opponents capabilities offensively, so we'd discuss a strategy around human players. Sometimes, autonomous left us in with such terrible field position (or even worse, bots were already pinned against the wall with terrible field position) that it became very difficult to mount a comeback. For qualifications, we couldn't expect to dictate to our alliance anything and have it actually happen, even with the simple things and with veteran teams (Match 47 -- Team #25 scores ~10 balls into their alliance partner's trailer during autonomous). I can't count the number of matches where our alliance came up with a strategy, we began executing the strategy, then for whatever reason the alliance partners deviated, failed to come through or kept getting in the way. Maybe it had to do with luck, or the opponents' counter-strategies, or ... whatever. It was nonetheless extremely difficult to fend for our self when that happened since our bot isn't a strong scorer as an arched shooter, which makes the little things moot and a 'dumper vs shooter' trade study perfectly necessary when doing scenarios & design at the beginning of the season. I wish we could have had more forethought into this during weeks 1, 2, & 3. To be honest we ran at 100% this build season and I have no regrets about it; we will simply upgrade for Atlanta.

Now, for eliminations I agree with Paul ... in elims, I agree that 'shooter vs dumper' doesn't matter so long as the moonrocks go into the opponents' trailers faster than the alliance's. Actually I think we need to examine 'what strategy when' type situations. Sure, it will get complicated, but it's better to be shared than to not. Even the FTC students on our team who have barely seen the FRC game have come up with some creative and effective solutions when asked. For example, when your primary scorer has a catastrophic scoring mechanism failure 30 seconds into a match, what do you do? We did 3 empty cells in a match when we were only supposed to do 1, while the broken team swapped roles with us and played defense (though all three super cells missed their targets thereby losing us the match ... heh).

Food for thought I guess.