Slightly I think and if you take a good FTC bot this year and make it bigger and mount the FRC motors and electronics and bumpers you have quite a competitive bot
1.) Drive train - same works in FRC and FTC or pretty much any drive train. In FTC the positioning is more challenging as you put the cones on up to 31 inch tall sticks (would be close to 6 foot in FRC scaled up) instead of the shelves plus you got a stick/obstacle every 2 feet would be the same if in FRC you had a serious obstacle every 38-40 in or so in every direction
2.) You have and arm/elevator in both to pick up cones. In frc you got cubes too which are dimensional close enough so the same claw/grip/etc should work for both.
3.) You got multiple height targets in both.
4.) you got image recognition options in both in FTC during Auto which some find more challenging.
5.) you got bumpers in FRC and not FTC but there still is some (idk how much this year) contact.
6.) FTC is way cheaper and probably (IMO) more technically challenging this year. Now the teter toter at the end is no big deal A kitbot scateboard in FTC will mostly score zero points this year unless maybe a very few autopoints especially if the team guesses the color right (1 of 3 chance) in FRC this year a kit bot skate board frame can score in auto (little) in the endgame on the teeter totter and can push some cones/cubes into the cubby/low level.
So at least IMO FRC this year is the big brother only in $$$ and size and in the fact that it has all those COTS and KOP rules that are mostly absent from FTC. At least ATM I am a bit disappointed
Disappointed in what exactly? There are certainly parallels in this season’s FTC and FRC games (cones, poles). It’s not uncommon for the two programs to share concepts (2016-2017 shooting wiffle balls, 2017-2018 placing cubes, 2018-2019 two different scoring elements).
I think similar game features are really interesting personally, as an FTC coach and an FRC mentor. We get to leverage knowlege gained from similar task and apply those concepts in a program where we have less time and things have a higher cost in failure.
Disappointed in the lack of direction and the need to build some components from scratch. Look at the past year. First just a one stage climber, then a rope climber then climbers where you could not “sink” after the power turned off, Buddy climbs and going from one rung to the other. On top of that sometimes some quite challenging obstacles. This year you can buy a kit bot, buy some elevators, buy a claw and follow the instructions so looks to me that this year an IKEA bot can be quite successful - maybe that is the intent to replace creativity with buying kits and following youtube videos. That is the disappointing part. Even if the tasks would be very similar between FTC and FRC I would have expected FRC to “take it to another level” and not step it down. JMO.
Well at least a team with a KOP robot if they opted for the frame can be quite successful this year not top tear. Whereas for example last year a KOP bot would at max have scored 2 points in the auto for driving fwd so many feet (forgot how many) This year they can score on the teeter totter and push around game pieces into targets. So well maybe the idea was to make it really easy for everyone to score kinda if you make the goal in soccer the size of the field and everyone gets a free kick guaranteed to score a goal without serious effort. IMO FRC ought to be very challenging and one ought to derive satisfaction from seeing ones creativity at work - good or bad.
I myself find this game to be pretty simple . I think FIRST did this because there will be a huge advantage using April tags and a lot of teams will need to spend most of their time getting it sorted out.
This is quite possible even in FTC (see the published documentation from FIRST on REV/Tetrix robots made from the kit of parts to play PowerPlay or the vendor videos from AndyMark/GoBilda that feature PowerPlay robots from off the shelf components).
There might be some merit to this. It’ll be interesting seeing how teams handle horizontal extensions up to 4 feet out given that most pick and place games have been predominantly vertical. There are lots of scoring locations this year and if 2017 was any indicator, the average alliance running full field cycles is not going to be completing the scoring grid every time.
I’m in the inspiration business so if making aspects of the field (but not everything) easier for teams to achieve and leads to more inspired kitbot kids, I’m all for it.
This I can definitely agree with (with a slight modification).
IDK if they are that big of an advantage. But I could see they could be somewhat helpful. But may that be as it is. Sometimes you got years like recycle rush. Well still helping build robots lol
i like to see a significant gradient in any challenge so that one who never picked up a ball in lets say basketball can improve his/her skill and derive satisfaction from it and that also an NBA great can find it challenging. I feel past games did for the most part a better job in that. In general I feel we always - as a society in recent past - spend a lot of attention towards the bottom end and forget about the top end. One needs stars to know what to strive for and stars need challenges (very) too to shine and show the rest what is possible. And I have seen both ends. But then its quite ok - no even necessary to disagree in a - what I hope - constructive manner
A big difference here is that linear extension in FTC is a very solved problem. Nearly every game in the last decade has involved a linear extension of some kind, and the “standard” solution is often some form of linear rail with pullies attached. Over the years, these solutions have been refined from Home Depot drawer slides to half a dozen vendors selling slides specifically for the program similar to COTS elevator kits. And this isn’t just vertical extension – horizontal and diagonal extension works very similar. If you scaled down the FRC game to FTC, it would be of similar mechanical difficulty for middle class to high level teams.
If anything, this FRC game is more novel if only because that program is much less familiar with horizontal extension in general.
It’s much easier for one person to assemble a robot – to the point where few teams are just drivetrains. A single person could assemble a drivetrain in a day out of just about any kit. Tab into any FTC event stream on youtube and you’ll actually see many low level teams will actually have an arm or a lift of some sort, even if they don’t work particularly well.
That said, one of the strongest teams in @mpirringer 's particular corner of New York is actually a 1dof arm with a claw on the end (3750). Very simple robots can get results.
The way they placed the tags almost requires that you use both the reflective tape and the april tags. When approaching cone drop off, it will be difficult to see the tag and you will have to either use the reflective vision target, or wing it the rest of the way with odometry. From their original statement about tape not being available, it could have been implied that April tags and Tape would both be used equivalently.
This year’s FRC game is less about ROBOT performance and more about ALLIANCE performance.
The game looks great, and I like it more every passing day. But the real challenges this year are in working with your alliance partners. Two meh robots working together can outscore a superbot working alone, and the potential for one weak robot to bring down your whole alliance is big (penalty points, tipped climbs…)
This game may look relatively simple, but it’s all about how well you can work with your partners.
The height might comparatively be lower, but I think a lot of people are really under estimating how difficult extending out to even the middle row is going to be. Cubes won’t be too bad as you can lob them on (but they might bounce out). But to place a cone on the middle row stick, a robot will likely need to extend over 2 ft from the frame perimeter. And to hit the top row, they’ll be extending nearly 3.5 ft! I can’t think of any FRC games that had anything close to that extension needed. We can already see the difficulty from some of the Ri3d teams on how hard it is to control the grabber position at full extension.
Comparing FRC to FTC robots is like comparing apples to oranges, because a lot of the physics doesn’t scale linearly (for example, rotational inertia squares over distance). Also, what are you using to determine a scale height between FRC and FTC?
. I think FIRST did this because there will be a huge advantage using April tags and a lot of teams will need to spend most of their time getting it sorted out.