A few weeks ago, 8515 demonstrated their Billiards auto, where they (a low goal bot) would get a high goal by replacing one of their opponents auto balls with their color own. Sadly, the shooting robot (118) missed the shot.
With some assistance from @UnofficialForth, 5613 successfully pulled it off in quals 55 at the FIT Amarillo Event!! Sadly the video doesn’t show it well, but you can see the red alliance score the blue alliance’s ball
Have any other teams pulled this off in a match?
If it succeeds, it gives that alliance an 8 point advantage and only uses 1 ball making it reasonably valuable IMO. Will we see this more in the coming weeks?
Thanks @Lexeo, we at 5613 appreciate the shout out.
A few more relevant pieces of information about that competition:
We actually had two matches back to back against 4206. We used 6.1.2 (robot placement rule) to force them to place first both times. We believe this was successful both times: Once in forcing them to run a less consistent auto, and once when they successfully shot our ball.
Secondly, while we were working on a more specialized auto to do this, we had a small issue with deployment. Thus, we only ran our “spit out ball and taxi backwards auto”. We found it just about as successful. This leads me to believe that this tactic is available to every team that can spit out a ball and back up, regardless if the ball rolls or bounces.
I can see this become very prevalent in coming weeks.
Yeah that was actually cool to watch. They had back to back qual attempts against us and it was their second attempt at it. Some little birdies watching the practice field texted us the first time so we switched to a three ball to block it. The second attempt we were hoping to just score it plus five of our balls but it didn’t work.
No worries though this week it’ll be a last second switch to four ball and/or launching the opposing ball to the hanger . I do love the game theory on this on whether or not everybot’s bluff it.
If you’d like more detail for where the camera was lacking…
They’re less billiards than 8515 showed. With 8515, we saw them drop their intake and shoot the cargo to displace the other.
In this instance, 5613 kept their intake up and bounced it towards the same starting position. In theory, 4206 could have grabbed both. I suspect they have an ability to determine they’ve grabbed a cargo and stopped trying to collect. Their rollers collected the bouncing cargo instead of their own staged. Their routine continued and they eventually scored the blue cargo instead of their own.
It’s worth pointing out this pairing happened four times (twice at the end of quals and twice in elims) and was successful 1/4 of those times. But, it sure was pretty that one time =)
Yeah after the first time we thought their ball was going slow enough to just catch it and ours. I quals we just wanted the RP so we didn’t really worry about scoring for the opposing alliance. I loved it though it was fun to see people try it.
“Heads up, we are calling 6.1.2”
“Oh, we know exactly what you are doing”
We actually talked with 4206. They have two autos, one of which is less consistent, but evades the snipe tactic discussed. They choose to run their 5 ball consistent auto in their last quals match. My understanding was that they were making checking to see if it was fast enough to get their ball (since they had 1st seed rank on lock). When it was shown that we could successfully snipe them, they switched back to their other auto.
Disclaimer: I’m 85% confident in the above statements based on our discussions/interactions I had. It is possible I am missing information on the full story. Major props to them, they had a wonderful robot and competition.
We ended up scoring a stray opponent cargo. Doubt it was intentionally, likely a misfire. But I didn’t find it, so it may have only been a practice match, but I’ll share if I do see it again.
. I do love the game theory on this on whether or not everybot’s bluff it.
