The FIRST day...

[Jeff Waegelin]

What about higher human stacks? Did anyone build a human stack higher than 4?

[DirtyBird213]

One team did place a stack of 6 (at the BAE), one human player placed 4, and the other player ran over with 2 and barely made it back out in time. However the other team knocked it down very quickly!
The most popular placement was 2 stacks of 2, or a standard 4.

[Ryan Foley]

it seemed to me (at BAE) that the winner was almost always determined by which way the boxes fell on the ramp. If the boxes on the ramp fell towards the red zone, red most often won, from the matches i saw at least. Once alliance A had most of the bins fall into their zone, alliance B had their work cut out for them trying to clear out alliance A's end zone, so they didnt have enough time to try and get some points for themselves.

stacking? only stacks you could actually make consistantly were the human player stacks. Robot-made stacks were extremely rare.

[Tonay K]

When I first got to the Sac regional and saw the bins fall at the start, I quickly came to the conclusion that whichever way the boxes fell, so too fell the match. Our robot was able to play effective defense by shoving boxes out the back or sides of an opponents zone, sometimes affecting the outcome in our favor. Don't be fooled by your first impression, these bins can be easily moved out of the scoring zone without picking them up. This seemed to be a very effective way of lowering your opponents score to the point where either you won, or you brought your average opponent score down and raised your rank.

[Eric G]

As far as stacking goes, there were two teams at the VCU regionals that I saw successfully stack boxes.

388 stacked one on another using a salad tong approach. They could lift a box in any configuration. <Good Job Grundy!!>

435 had a 3 sided stacker with surgical tubing on a frame to grab under the lip of each stack. They appeared to only be able to pick up stacks in the up right position. They always worked on stacks whether they won or not. They created a 6 stack and won with it.

Humans created stacks of 5 and 6 frequently. Normally the stacks were created by a box or two being SLID across the floor to the other human player. Most stacks were placed just inside the gate. Boxes placed in front of robots, or in their paths, never seemed to make a difference on the VCU field. If the other fields have more of a lip at the bottom of the wire mesh, there could be potential for more obstruction.

As for teams always winning who get most of the boxes from the ramp, there were times when that is not what happened. Once it happened when I was coaching our team. I checked the scoreboard to see if we were ahead and I decided that we not to knock down our opponents' stacks. I was hoping to maximize our score, but they turned out to be ahead at the end. <Good Job 977!>

See you all at nationals!
Eric

[WakeZero]

Originally posted by David.Cook
Well said, and I agree with you. I would prefer to be able to stack, and focus on building the point score rather than destroying it. Our students did not set out to create a stacker, so we are what we are.

I applaud the teams that designed the more difficult solution. Now we need a game that enables that solution to pay off as a valid strategy and have some reasonable chance of success. Please understand, I am not saying you shouldn't try to stack. I expect teams with well-designed stackers to win awards. What I am saying is that statistically speaking, stacking is an outlier. It will happen, but only rarely.

We will just have to wait and see. Honestly, I agree with you on the outlier part...

There will be at least one team who can stack 6 high about 75% of the time. I can't wait to see it, and I think they will seed high... so they can pick the best KotH bot