The 2010 Curve Ball

[Nate Smith]

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

Stairs.

Possibly, but people have been predicting stairs ever since Dean's wheelchair first made an appearance...

[dtengineering]

Please let it be a larger playing field.

This allows room for all the mid-field obstacles from earlier four robot games that really became kind of impractical with six machines crammed on to the field.

But, sigh... I do know space is limited in some of the smaller FRC venues, so we're not likely to see that.

Perhaps, however, we might have strict limits on energy consumption... efficiency is always a good thing. Maybe each robot will be fitted with an ammeter to measure total current flow, and it will report back to the field control system how much power each robot is drawing. Alliances will then have "power consumption points" deducted from their final score.

Or maybe the combined total power consumed by all three robots in on an alliance will be monitored... so if robot one is in a pushing match and needs to pour on the juice, robots two and three need to dial back their consumption a bit. THAT would be a real challenge for drivers!

Jason

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Please let it be a larger playing field.

Smaller robots would give the same effect.

[Jon Jack]

Smaller robots + the non-compactness of our existing control system = major pain in the neck

The cRIO (and it's auxiliary hardware) is far too bulky to make the robots significantly smaller. We've had very wide open fields the past couple of year (2006, out side of the ramps was wide open / 2007, fairly wide open except near the rack / 2008, pretty wide open unless there was lots of traffic generated / 2009, wide open). Putting more elements on the field or creating obstacles would be kind of nice...