How do you think the competition for notes during autonomous will play out at the high level? I foresee many of the top teams having a four note auto, and almost all Champs playoffs alliances being able to score the three notes in their wing with only two robots. This means that at least one robot per alliance will be tasked with picking up a center-line note during auto.
Will we have high speed crashes or will opponents coopertate and coordinate to arrange which notes to go for? I’ve asked this Q&A question to ensure that coordinating is legal: https://frc-qa.firstinspires.org/qa/23. Assuming so, is it GP to convince an opponent to go for a suboptimal center-line note by implying that a high speed collision will result if they go for the same note as you (“it would be a shame if someone ran into your intake at 20 ft/s”)? How about intentionally changing your auto to go for the same note as the opposing team, knowing that a collision is likely?
Also, without coordination, the strategy of the center line notes is interesting. If you expect the other team to be faster than you, it makes sense to go for a random note so that they can’t easily steal your note from you. Vision processing could be used to go for an available note dynamically, avoid collisions, or go for the same note as an opponent with the intent to steal it. There will be likely mindgames on Einstein about robot placement and auto-routines.
I’m looking forward to both the whirling dervish “touch all the rings” auto and to a robot that responds successfully to the whirling dervish and still grabs a ring and scores…
Anyone who’s watched VRC games will be familiar with how these play out as they have auto fights in almost every game.
There’s a lotta options. I expect teams at higher levels to try to reach the center as fast as possible, possibly even dropping the preload and picking it up later to get to the center faster, and definitely skipping the close three notes until later. We will see teams prefer to run three ring autos that reach the center faster rather than four ring autos that reach the center later, as winning the auto fights are a fairly sizeable advantage.
The thing that I don’t like about this whole “race to the center” is that this isn’t going to be bumper to bumper contact, it’s going to be intake to intake hits, and it’s mostly going to be robots that are traveling very fast. Lots of intakes are going to be broken in autonomous.
In an auton crash, a robot extending outside its own frame perimeter is at a pretty serious risk of the nasty consequences that may develop from the exclusively escalating G417-G418-G419 penalties. I would agree that the game of chicken isn’t worth the risk unless you have an under-bumper intake, OR you know the opponent’s intake is over-bumper.
I think ML being more accessible has opened up super cool (and really fun to watch) options for auto in the center then you’re normal “find a game piece on the floor” use case.
I don’t remember it being a big part, I think there were a few attempts to do that but there was never a thing called “The Can Agreement”. You might be thinking of the Noodle Agreement, which was the same year. Much more prominent were the can fights, which were fun to watch but, once you knew who was winning it, you knew who would win the match too.
For the Can wars how did they make sure teams were not constantly shuffling to get the best match up. There may be an ambidextrous pitcher rule that needs to be added.
