Hello!
My team has been discussing strategy, particularly with relation to scaling the castle at the end of the matches, and whether it’s worth it to build our robot with these capabilities. I wanted to take a poll of the general robotics community.
Sorry about the fact that responders cannot see the results. I will be posting the results on this thread once I have enough results to tell anything.
Thanks for responding!
You (anyone) can click “view previous responses” after you finish to see the results.
With about 200 replies, 61% say yes they will scale. The most likely priority is 8 out of 10.
Our team didn’t feel like scaling the tower added anything to our strategy. We do believe that we may have to add that capability later in the season, but it’s not worth putting resources into it until we’re certain that we’ll reach the District and/or World Championships.
If we have the weight and space, then a climbing mechanism may be developed in the time between the end of build season and District Championships, so long as our robot doesn’t need any serious modifications during that time.
Climbing is worth 10 points more than just driving onto the batter at the end. The key question is “how much is 10 points worth?” It’s equivalent to a max cycle (cross a defense and shoot high goal), it’s more than a low goal cycle, and it’s equivalent to 2 high goals. Can I do any of those tasks in the final 20 seconds more reliably than I can climb? How about at a high level when I start experiencing diminished returns (all the defenses have been breached)? I think climbing will be the thing that separates the top pick at regionals/districts and the 4th/5th picks. It’ll also be the separating factor for 3rd and 4th robots on alliances at Champs.
In addition to point value from climbing, you also need to look at the time, effort, weight, and space of building a climber. You could also ask if instead of putting time into building a climber you made the rest of your robot faster and more effective to get an extra 1-2 (arbitrary number) cycles instead.
I created the Google Forms poll before I created my Chief Delphi account, so by the time I created my account, I decided I might as well use the one I created already rather than spend time recreating it in Delphi.
With the second question, I was interested in how much priority, in the grand scheme of your strategic plans for the last minute of competition and the design of your robot, you assign to scaling the castle. Does it not matter to you, and you think other scoring methods in the last minute are more productive? If so, select 1. If, on the other hand, scaling the castle is first priority for you in the last minute of the game, then select 10.
Does this clear everything up? If not, feel free to reply and let me know.
Thanks for letting me know! I didn’t know what the experience was for someone besides me, as I am logged in to my account (which has a different view, as it can edit and run the survey) when I see the poll. Thanks for letting me know!
I’ve turned the poll off, and it is no longer accepting responses. At closing, the poll had 474 responses.
It’s important to note that those who answered “Not Sure” or “No” to the first question did not have to answer the second one, and many did not.
Thanks to everyone who participated! If these links do not work, please feel free to let me know.
Also, if you want to crunch this data further can find a spreadsheet with all the responses here.
These are links to files on your computer. I suggest hosting the images on Imgur or similar.
Sorry about that-I accidentally hit the Post button while I was amending this. The link should be fixed now. I posted the image on our team’s Instagram, and linked to the image there.