We’ve seen teams experimenting with shooting into the trap. But I haven’t been able to find any videos of anyone scoring in the trap in the “intended” way. The intended way as far as I can tell is climbing on the chain first. It seems amazing to me how universally teams have deprioritized this. We’ve already seen teams post 5 note and 6 note autos, but no videos of climb trap scores.
Is your team working on this scoring method? Have you done it? Is everybody just keeping their methods a secret?
I don’t think they’ve posted a video physically scoring into the trap, but Spectrum (3847) has demonstrated multiple ways of elevating the bot to score in that manner. You may want to check out their build thread. My team is using a similar concept to one of the ideas they had, though our geometry is a bit different.
No, I was told we should stop trying
Here is a video where it was achieved with LEGOs:
Every year, FRC figures out the climb relatively fast, and 90% of all climbs are done that way. I don’t think anyone has definitively come up with “the way to do it” the same way as previous years. Lots of different designs that haven’t been proven, and likely a few teams have successfully done it, but aren’t going to share until their first regional.
Every one of the robots with a trap mechanism are behemoths, most of which can’t get under the stage, when everything about the rest of the game is pointing toward light, short, fast robots that can cycle quickly.
Our strategy is: Just shoot it in (already did it a few times), and if we see something really clever at our week 1 regional, maybe slap that on our robot by our week 4 regional. Which is exactly why teams are playing it close to the vest.
That’s not going to be true for the powerhouses who trap.
Scoring in the trap in the intended way is hard, and consumes the design efforts of the teams that are going for it. I think you haven’t seen it much for two reasons:
Well they haven’t shown anything, so we only know what has been put out there already, and they all look big and heavy to me.
And for all we know, all the powerhouses who trap will shoot it in, because that’s easier, faster, and can trap all 3 of the traps instead of just the one they climb.
Our alpha robot has the climb fully attached and wired as of last night so if testing goes well we may have a full robot powered trap climb tonight, if not maybe this weekend, or if it goes real bad we may have to wait a while.
This is very a similar to our robot
I think a lot of the lack of focus on the trap comes down to strategic discussions that most teams had the first weekend of build season. Most teams recognize that they can’t do everything so they cut out the things that aren’t worth them spending time trying to do. This year the trap is the most difficult objective to engineer for and has relatively low point value so it is the first thing most teams cut.
Easier and faster?
The alignment and shooting precision required to reliably launch a note into the trap is extreme. Good luck doing that in the heat of competition with a shredded, topologically altered game piece. Failure means a note could get stuck completely. You might have to find another note to loosen the first one–not great if you have four seconds left in the match.
Traversal climb in 2022 took awhile to figure out.
I think we’ve got a method in the “intended” vein, but we need to finish the whole robot and then test quite a bit. The geometry works in CAD… but what works in CAD does not always translate to real world success.
The allure of the stage RP is very strong, and even though many kitbot teams are talking about adding a climber the chances of all 3 alliance partners climbing are low enough that we felt we had to at least try for the trap.
We also knew we would never have the resources to build a field-accurate stage with trap door to try to tune a trap shot.
Our desires are tainted a bit by our 2022 performance record, where our automated and (mostly) reliable traversal climb got us the 1 spot in our first district event and 2 in the second. Then we broke horribly at States…
Trap has vacuum climb in 2019 vibes. It’s value will manifest differently based off of different robot combos at events.
There will be a simple trap solution that is just “stolen” and copied. This is fine, this is how the frc world works. “Pick one or two hard things outsource the rest” or “steal from the best invent the rest” are perfectly valid.
I see way to many teams (at least in the first two weeks) try to combine mechanisms for a one off scoring location. Single use mechanisms are the way to go in my opinion. A few 3d printed parts, surgical tubing, fiberglass driveway markers and a small motor gets you pretty close to the trap with a very modest climb height.
Not many teams do single use mechanisms any more unfortunately. 118 in 2018 and 2023, 1756 in 2023. Those are the only two that come to ming right now (definitely more out there, I am just not recalling them).
Here are the results from tonight’s tests and iterations. It still needs some tweaking, but I’m confident it will work.
Thanks! It looks good! Love to see actual video evidence of someone scoring in the trap like that. It does still look very hard, from relying on the climber, to the amount of force and friction needed to get the note in. To figuring out if you need a “cape” to get the note in.
Are you guys fairly sure something like this is going to be on your finished robot? How much work do you think it will be to get it working quickly and consistently?
Yes it will be on our finished robot, and we don’t know how much work it will be until we do it, but with it basically working now it’s just updating CAD for the final robot and fitting it in. The climb sequence once automated will be very quick (under 5 secs). It’s not much added complexity to the robot since it’s just an extension of our amp mechanism and a simple chained slide for the climb. The only parts that are really only for the trap are the wheels that roll on the wall and now the cape.
All of that iteration in the blog post took place over a single day, and there is still over a month until our first event.
Who says you can only climb once?
