Picture this scenario… you’re playing in the playoffs againt [insert local powerhouse team here] as an underdog alliance, trying to pull off the upset. The opposing alliance has an elite center Note Auto that your alliance can’t match. You’re doomed to start Teleop in a 10+ point deficit.
Instead of having your 3rd robot shoot their note and back up, how nice would it be if they could prevent the best robot on the opposing alliance from scoring 2, 3, or even 4 center Notes by throwing off their auto path with Autonomous Defense. You don’t even need to pick up the Notes, just be in the way and contact the opposing alliance enough to throw them off.
The path isn’t super challenging, but you’re playing with fire if you run it for the first time ever in the playoffs. I’d propose that every team would be benefited by working on and testing a defensive auto routine for situations like the one posed above. Beat the opponent to the first Note, and then disrupt the starting position of the rest while the opponent is scoring.
Defending a point is just as good as scoring a point. Only one robot is realistically needed to score the 3 close Notes. If you can’t develop a multi Note auto, see if you can ruin somebody else’s.
On the flip side of things I’m really excited to see how elite teams handle Autonomous defense. The games of chess we’re going to see at high levels is going to be beyond exciting.
I would agree that auto defense will be a thing but, with how good vision has gotten, you are going to be able to grab and move those notes into your half of the field.
I think it’s more likely that we’ll see teams with alternate auto routines that are designed to grab center field notes first. This would be a good complement to the autos we’ve been seeing, so that one team does a five or six note auto using the speaker notes and one or two center field notes, while another does one that goes straight to the center and shoots three or four notes from there from the side the other alliance member’s auto isn’t going to. You could end up with 11 note autos from an alliance that way. It would also be defensive in that it would be set to grab center field notes before an opposing alliance’s auto could get to them.
The real question is not really the first note. If you are an elite auto team you are likely getting there first. The question is when they come back for the second note. I am excited to see a time where a team bulldozes all the notes off their starting spot and a team with a ML camera finds a note over the line that is displaced. That will be neat.
Until an autonomous defense routine uses vision to target the opposing robot and follows them to that Note… like I said the potential for autonomous strategies will be insanely fun.
Denial auto. Just strafe with your OVER THE BUMPER intake out, collecting and soft shooting all the center line notes. Then they’re closer to your speaker for teleop.
If you can beat them to the first note, you’re just the better auto team.
If you can, mid-competition, switch to an auto that beats them to their second note while still scoring a good amount of notes (depends on the level of competition), and they have no counter, you’re just the better auto team.
If you’re the better auto team, there is no problem in the first place.
If you can only score one or two in auto, so you switch to one that messes with their second or third note, without getting in the way of your alliance partners, mad respect.
Some teams will start studying how autonomous Japanese sumo robots win matches and you’re in for a real circus in the neutral zone. The defender is going to have swerve too.
At this level - regionals and district events - the third robot is not likely to be able to do this reliably - just tempering expectations here.
Now DCMP and Worlds? More than likely.
Best auto defense in my mind that is truly achievable by most? line up on the edge of the starting zone and just back up and sit on the center line - you could even use the a-stop in theory, just go slow and hit the button (There is literally NO rule stopping you from doing this!)
Sure they may get one or even 2 notes. but you just need to be a set of bumpers in the way to disrupt auto. there weill NOT be more than 1 or two teams out there that figure out full self driving to get around a stopped bot center field.
This is a really good strategy for fast bots but it has a few issues. Main thing is that if there’s a robot faster than you on the other side trying to pick up nodes from the middle to score it can move other nodes so you would need to probably incorporate some sort of computer vision to keep track of the nodes and also something to keep track of robot pose so that your bot never crosses over looking for a ring. Hard to pull off but definitely worth it.
