Shooter vs Dumper Trade Study

[Bongle]

Advantage to a shooter is that presumably, it can act as a dumper simply by slowing the spinning of its power mechanism (wheels, etc).

Based on our tests so far, it appears that tracking and auto-targeting opponent's trailers' is possible:
-We successfully wrote code that can distinguish an opponent's trailer
-The same code can give you distance and heading information within a few % points of the true value.
-By tracking the change in distance and heading, you can determine both the position and velocity of an opposing team's trailer, and thus lead it by an appropriate amount.

But:
-The enemy trailer will pretty much never be moving at a constant velocity
-There appears to be fairly substantial slowdowns in the camera code. It's not really real-time, more like 500ms-behind-real-time. We don't know how much this can be fixed, that'll be tonight's meeting's topic.
-The balls are irregular, and will become even more irregular as regionals proceed. Thus, muzzle velocities will be unpredictable.
-'Camping' and shooting will not be effective: you'll be a sitting duck for dumpers. Handling the accelerations that your robot is undergoing as well as the accelerations of your target will make your shooting much less accurate

When we were doing our original analysis, we essentially decided that shooters will have more opportunities to score, but will convert fewer of those opportunities into actual points.

[Donut]

There is a hybrid option that really doesn't fall into these two categories though. A shooter doesn't have to use a turret and camera (and may not want to since it restricts you to one ball at a time), but could instead pursue a similar strategy to a dumper of getting close to an opponent's goal and unloading a large amount of balls into it. Being a shooter allows you to power the balls (instead of relying on a gravity dump) and gives you a few foot range rather than requiring your robot to be right next to the opponent.

[Goldeye]

Originally Posted by Bongle

But:
-The enemy trailer will pretty much never be moving at a constant velocity
-'Camping' and shooting will not be effective: you'll be a sitting duck for dumpers. Handling the accelerations that your robot is undergoing as well as the accelerations of your target will make your shooting much less accurate

The low friction and thus low acceleration minimizes the effect of these problems.

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Goldeye

The low friction and thus low acceleration minimizes the effect of these problems.

If your shooter has a moderate speed (8ft/s), then a robot just 10ft away could accelerate hard enough to be 1.5ft away from where you expected it to be (if you assume constant velocity). If you add in the inevitable imprecision of an orbit-ball shooter, the amount of balls you'd get in would be low.

A powered dumper seems to be the way to go.

[Goldeye]

Originally Posted by Bongle

If your shooter has a moderate speed (8ft/s), then a robot just 10ft away could accelerate hard enough to be 1.5ft away from where you expected it to be (if you assume constant velocity). If you add in the inevitable imprecision of an orbit-ball shooter, the amount of balls you'd get in would be low.

A powered dumper seems to be the way to go.

By similar arguments, a moving robot further than 1-2 feet away will, at the least, be a challenge to reach and dump into, particularly for long enough to dump all the stored orbit balls. I don't know the radius of the goal offhand. Isn't the radius about 1.5ft? If the error due to acceleration is just that, then the only real concern is the precision of a shooter. I can't comment on that

Also, 10 feet really isn't that close. Robots can easily get within 5 feet of eachother, I just envision trouble getting closer (and staying there)

There's no right answer, and teams will get both ways working, but I feel confident saying this just from the nature of this year's driving: if you can build a device that aims independently of your robot and propels the balls (at least slightly), you will have a much easier time getting balls in the goal. There are still other tradeoffs, of course.