Small balls in 2001 competition

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Posted by ChrisH at 04/30/2001 1:50 PM EST


Engineer on team #330, Beach 'Bots, from Hope Chapel Academy and NASA JPL, J & F Machine, Raytheon, et al.


In Reply to: Small balls in 2001 competition
Posted by Patrick Dingle on 04/29/2001 4:33 PM EST:



I don't know about other teams, but we deliberately decided not to handle small balls because of the low effort/points ratio. It was almost as much effort to pick up a small ball as a big one for far less payoff.

This was in spite of having a robot design from the previous year that would have easily picked up three or four small balls and deposited them in the goal within 30 seconds with only slight modification.

I think the worst part of this game was that there was one critical operation, balancing goals. Further, it could only be performed by one robot. As I understand it most discussion in stratgey sessions revolved around who would accomplish this task. Finally, if this task was not accomplished the whole alliance suffered, but there was no way to tell for real if a team could accomplish it but to let them try, and possibly suffer for the result

While it would be theoretically possible to design robots to work together to accomplish the balancing task it is very difficult to do this without collaborating on the design. ( Congrats to Wildstang and the other rampbots for figuring a way around this)This is hindered by the random assignment of partners. Why design your robot to work with a particular other robot when there is no guarantee you'll ever get to work together?

A large part of this could be eliminated by increasing the number of scoring possibilities. For example, how would it have changed things if there were TWO bridges? For even more fun add two more goals. Leave all the other rules the same and you have a totally different game. Of course, big ball limbobots might not be in such demand, but you would have vastly increased the number of potential goal balancing robots and reduced the failure risk in each match.

It was very frustrating to get a poor ranking in spite of accomplishing your assigned tasks more than 90% of the time because your partners did not accomplish their tasks. Especially when they often were fighting hard to get the chance to fail. Very similar to being the star player on a bottom of the standings team.

Just my thoughts

Chris Husmann, PE
Team 330 the Beach'Bots