Abandoning Floor Loading

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

My personal opinion is that picking up off the floor will be incredibly important: Just look at 2007, when did you ever see a robot go all the way to slot to pick up a ring.

Not a fair comparison; in 2007 half the pieces started on the floor, lined up along the diamond-plate.

[EricH]

If you can't floor load, you can't swipe your opponent's missed throw.

If you can't slot load, you have to floor load so that your floor-loading opponent doesn't get to that thrown tube before you do.

If you can do both, then you can grab any tube on the field that isn't scored or in one of your forbidden areas.

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

Not a fair comparison; in 2007 half the pieces started on the floor, lined up along the diamond-plate.

But just as in 2007, I don't see the feeding slots being used very much at all. Human players should opt to just throw them out there, probably to about midfield is the farthest possible. This decreases the time it takes robots to retrieve and allows you to load them onto the field much faster. I also don't see much competition for pieces between alliances since there are enough to fill all the grids.

For these reasons, picking them up from the ground is vital to our strategy. It's even affecting our drivetrain, because we're not worrying so much about speed as just maneuverability in our half of the field, because we don't need to go the 54' to the feeding slots.

[JamesCH95]

Also not fair because in 2007 the Red alliance could only use red tubes, and the Blue alliance could only use blue tubes, so there was no risk of the other alliance stealing tubes your alliance threw out.

[Austin2046]

floor loading was important in 2007 because you could easily throw tubes to the central scoring structure (or right next to it) so your robot could just pick them up and put them on.

the main difference i see is that in 07 each alliance had their own game pieces (blue tubes or red tubes) this year the game pieces are common. the tubes thrown out by the red alliance human players can be used by the blue alliance to score and vice versa. so floor loading is important if you want to steal the opposing alliance's game pieces as well as the obvious distance advantage of picking up a thrown tube vs a slot tube.

i can see an alliance at first trying to throw tubes 1/2 the field to have their robots retrieve them from a shorter distance. yet at the same time i can see the other alliance having their human players hold onto their tubes or slot feed them while the robots try to steal the thrown tubes.

[ttldomination]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

Not a fair comparison; in 2007 half the pieces started on the floor, lined up along the diamond-plate.

But even these tubes were rarely touched. Granted, if the throwing option wasn't available, I suppose some teams would've knocked these tubes flat and then picked them up.

My team is going for the floor load. We figure that things are going to be very '07ish. The best teams are going to want their drivers to have tubes available, and IMO that means getting a tall human player with one heck of an arm.

- Sunny

[EricH]

Originally Posted by ttldomination

But even these tubes were rarely touched. Granted, if the throwing option wasn't available, I suppose some teams would've knocked these tubes flat and then picked them up.

That's what 330 did. Strategic move, too--it's a lot harder to deploy ramps when there's a tube right there that you have to avoid, thanks to some scoring robot knocking half of them down while trying to acquire a tube.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by EricH

That's what 330 did. Strategic move, too--it's a lot harder to deploy ramps when there's a tube right there that you have to avoid, thanks to some scoring robot knocking half of them down while trying to acquire a tube.

Every one of our first 2007 qualification rounds where we couldn't do anything but defense & ramps I told the kids "go mess up their home zone". It worked too.

[JesseK]

We're designing the mechanism to do both since we think we've found a fairly elegant solution for both -- the team was split either way. We want the capability for both since stealing the opposition's tube from the floor significantly increases immediate gains in score differential compared to not even having the capability to pick up from the floor.

However, doing both isn't essential to our overall strategy. Doing one or the other IS essential.