I noticed that, although TBA provides some valuable statistics about defense crossings from event to event, it doesn’t really show anything about defense crossing overall. I’ll work on some visualization, but I made an overall average of defense crossings, including weeks 0.5 and 1: https://i.imgur.com/l4mSfwm.jpg
I was particularly surprised by the drawbridge. Can anyone who’s been to competition provide some clarity as to why drawbridge crosses are so rare? Also, if anyone wants any specific style of data visualization, I’d be happy to provide!
EDIT: I will be doing a line graph of week-to-week changes in crossing rates. However, with only 2 weeks of events, the graph is hardly that interesting.
I’ll give you my insight after competing this weekend.
It was by far the harder class C defense to cross simply because of how strong the spring is and how flexible the bridge itself is. As you leave contact with the bridge the door shoots up very quickly, this makes the flick methods that is super effective with the sally port useless.
This basically means it has to be crossed with some help from partners driving through from the courtyard side. This wasn’t super common until eliminations.
It is a tremendous pain for (at least us) to firstly get the drawbridge down, as the hinge is at a spot where its hard for our treads to get grip. After that, we would be flung off trying to get off it in any way, so we basically ignored it as much as possible. I would link you the video to that match, but unlike FIRSTWA’s usual great video recording the West Valley event is a mess with mislabeled matches and some just outright missing (which seems to be unfortunately normal for this and CWU’s event…)
First off, few teams designed and built mechanisms for dealing with the Drawbridge. Also, for those that did, there is shocking difference in the real Drawbridge and the wood versions the vast vast majority of teams were using. Many of the simple hooks or arms that grabbed the top of tje door and pulled down won’t work with the flexible plastic.
Also, if alliances can breach without worrying about the Drawbridge, they don’t want to. People are scared of it. As for why alliances aren’t working together to make crossings, I don’t know. I was just watching the live footage, so I don’t know if teams just chose not to go with that strategy, if teams are so frantic with repairs and such that they can’t effectively Scout and strategize, or what.
Finally, for the many “catch and release” methods people were previously discussing for teams opening the Drawbridge from the Courtyard, going into the Neutral Zone, breaking contact, then crossing back over the Drawbridge to earn the crossing: I think the refs have too much to watch to see teams momentarily break contact with a door that almost looks like it moves, jiggles, and swings of it’s own volition.
Drawbridge wasn’t planned on being as springy or with that material in mind. We tried opening it for teammates by crossing over other defenses and ramming it down, but it was so springy there was almost no time before our robot either fell off of it or was flipped back by it.
What’s actually interesting in the stats is the rough terrain.
It actually (to my surprise) scored a third in least-crossed, but unlike the sally port and drawbridge, it had a really high success rate. Perhaps because few robots tried it but those who did knew they would get over? It became one of the staple defenses that our robot could do (one of the few). What was even more surprising was the moat and the sally port. I would have assumed that the sally port would be damaged more often, however it usually required at least two robots (one to open it from the “wrong” side and one to follow through for the damage point) even though in scrimmage it didn’t seem to be an issue for most bots. Another one was moat. For some reason we (and other teams) were having trouble crossing it even though again in scrimmage it was fine. Teams (unless they were built with treads or LARGE wheels) gave up on it (perhaps the ramp angle on the moat was different or etc) after attempting and failing once. Low bar was great, but they had to remove the fabric.
This map shows breaching rates by region. Data taken into account includes all week 0.5 and 1 events. I’m sure this will become much more interesting by weeks 3 to 4.
The rough terrain wasn’t on the field much, but when it was there, alliances appear to have crossed it largely at will (94% of crossing opportunities, damaged 91% of opportunities), although individual teams may have had more trouble.
In my deeper analysis, the group D defense was the rough terrain around 29% of the time. When it was on the field, it was in the audience position 58% of the time. The audience took the rough terrain in 68.7% of selections. Teams picked it only 16% of the time.
The event by event statistics are all over the place, with extremes of rough terrain presence 10% of the time in Auburn Mountainview and 46.7% in Hatboro-Horsham.
We lived on breaching… it works to get you to elims. But once there you need to shoot to or else you may be a liability . Because in eliminations pretty much any alliance can breach and if you cant shoot you will struggle to win. We plan to shoot more next week and scale more. Hope it works. Yes, we are in dark green California in above map.
Our drive team was so focused on breaching to get the extra RP …we did not shoot enough and failed us in SF. That won’t happen again. We will shoot.
