So I don’t normally make threads on CD with this sort of thing, but I’m really interested to see where teams stand here.
Are you floor loading this year, or are you opting out in lieu of simplicity, design priority, or other similar reasons? If you’re willing to share, go ahead and post your rationale behind your decision. If not… see you in 6 weeks. 
In our strategy meeting yesterday, our team voted it to nearly last. Essentially, if we make a grabber that can pick up off the floor, great, but if we cant, then thats just too bad.
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. Maybe it had something to do with the orientation of the slot, but regardless, it will be important this year, especially for stealing the enemy’s pieces that their human players throw. Maybe I can sell the team on that 
Not a fair comparison; in 2007 half the pieces started on the floor, lined up along the diamond-plate.
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.
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.
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.
In 2007 the tubes were alliance specific. You could throw them all over the field and you didn’t have to worry about the other alliance taking your tubes.
This year is different, I think teams that toss their tubes onto the field will be like tossing a worm into a fishbowl, you better be the fastest fish cause i’m going to try and take that tube.
In your Lane your protected, you can give the tube to your robot in the orientation that you want (Important for the Triangle and Square) and as long as you have a good gripper, that tube is as good as yours. No variables.
We actually haven’t decided yet, but thats my opinion.
While I don’t speak for my team, in my opinion if you can’t floor load and drop one tube through the feeder, you are going to have trouble getting past that ringer in front of you to get back to the feeding area.
Actually in 2007 our main means of acquiring a tube was from the feeder slot. We built an arm that had close to 300 degrees of rotation and a single joint so that our driver could always face the rack and the manipulator just had to flip the arm over and then back up to the feeder slot then flip it back over with the tube and then drive to the rack. Now, do we wish we could have built a claw that could have both scooped up tubes and grabbed them from the feeder slot, yes. But like many have said already, 2007 had alliance specific game pieces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A robot cannot cross the boundary into an opponent’s lane, but I wonder what they can do to keep an opponent in that lane longer than they like. It’s not exactly the most wide open place to exit.
It’s a trap! (?)
Also, if the best human players can do when tossing tubes over the wall is to reach midfield, that means that the majority of tossed tubes will end up on the opponent’s side of the field, closer to the opposing scoring zone.
Decisions, decisions.
Generally, that kind of attitude towards a design feature means it never gets done. Not saying it’s a wrong choice to abandon floor loading, just commenting on the design process.
We on Team 1089, also second this philosophy. IN 2007 we picked up tubes from the floor very very quickly. We also believe that a number of tubes will be dropped. This means (unless I missed it as being not allowed in the rules), we would then be able to grab that tube off the floor and score for ourselves with it instead of our opponents.
It seems to me that floor loading is vital to the success of the best teams. If you can floor-load, and steal your opponents game pieces to put on your own rack, then you don’t have to put all of your game pieces into play, thereby limiting the scoring opportunities.
You run down and pick up a round tube from your loader, you then race back down and have to put it between two other tubes to complete a row and score big points but you miss and drop it. You loose the match and that darn tube is sitting on the floor mocking you.
Will you be able to live with your decision then?
A floor loader can:
Pick up pieces opponent’s robot’s drop
Pick up pieces from feeder/HP (have them drop it on the floor in the lane)
Pick up pieces that an alliance feeder/ferry bot bring back and drop in the alliance zone
Pick up pieces that are thrown onto the field
A feeder loader can:
Pick up pieces from the height of the feeder slot
Who has the upper hand?
I’ll tell u that if I’m in a match against an alliance with no floor loading capabilities and our alliance can, we will definitely be chucking all of the pieces onto the floor regardless b/c we could get them and the other alliance could not.