Does your team plan on driving under the stage?

FIRST General Forum
1
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

If you want, please share your reasoning why.

1 Like
2

“Under the stage/core” is solidly in our “nice to have” list. We won’t be trying to fit under there, but if we can do it then great.

26 Likes
3

Around the two sides of the stages would become easy bottle necks when a bunch of other teams need to drive there because they are too tall. But by being able to drive under the stage it will open up the entire field to drive around and the probable fact of notes going under the stage that would be beneficial to grab.

4

I was watching the animation and it says while driving around you cannot go under the stage.

5

Animation doesn’t necessarily reflect rules.

There are no FRC rules saying a robot cannot drive under a stage, theirs or their opponents’. Depending on exact robot geometry, the laws of physics may prevent robots from going under the Stage.

If you were watching the Kitbot demo, the inability to go under the stage is a design decision made by the Kitbot design team to simplify things for the initial build, and may be iterated out.

11 Likes
6

i think driving under the stage would be so nice if you are trying to cycle fast for the pure reason it gives another lane to cycle in.

1 Like
7

Same. If we can do everything on our “needs” list and stay under we will be thrilled. If not, oh well.

6 Likes
8

I would add a “maybe” to the poll. We are certain we will do so, but not at the expense of the functionality

3 Likes
9

Agreed. I wouldn’t prioritize it if it conflicts with mechanisms we decide to build, but it would be really nice to have.

1 Like
10

I’m not sure it’s something my team has strictly considered yet, but it is something I’ve been looking at with some of my super-secret (not for student eyes, they have to come up with their own darned robot!) design sketches. FIRST did a really good job of forcing design tradeoffs with the different challenges in this year’s game - something as simple as designing for this shorter max height makes designing for some other aspects of the game much harder.

7 Likes
11

it’s def on our list, but that restricts height to smth like 2 ft, meaning that we either have a pancake robot or some sort of lowering system, which is kinda annoying to work w

1 Like
12

We decided we needed to have a low center of gravity, because last year’s bot was held back mostly by almost tipping after hard maneuvers (and this is after programming a speed limiter). So we’re definitely going to stick to a 2 ft height.

3 Likes
13

For my team it is a goal unless we need to sacrifice a scoring mechanism.

14

While simulation games like XRC are obviously not perfect representations of how the game flow will go, my team and I found making cycles significantly easier when we were able to drive under the stage/chain

5 Likes
15

I think it will provide nicer lines between your speaker and source, which is great for teleop and auto. It isn’t a strict requirement for us, but i really can’t see us building a robot that can’t fit under the stage.

Plus, there’s really no disadvantage for doing it, other than making design a bit harder maybe.

16

My team is going to aim to go under because we were thinking that with the need for fast cycles and with the speaker only being amplified for 10 seconds we want to be as fast as possible.

17

There’s also the fact that if robots are trying to score trap whenever during teleop, going under the core could get you fouls if you bump into them while they are scoring suspended

1 Like
18

We will drive under the stage if design permitting. While it is our goal, it is a relatively low priority one that would get sacrificed if needed.

19

At this point everyone plans to do it. Ask again in 3 weeks once mechanisms and other requirements solidify and I think you will see far fewer teams capable of going under than plan to per the poll. This is the reality for choices like this every year.

5 Likes
20

This is a little bit of a conspiracy theory me and a few friends came up with, but, here it is anyway. We believe that GDC initially designed the stage as something that would take effort and time to design a robot that could go under it, but, as they built the kitbot they realized that going under the stage is (relatively) easy, so they intentionally raised the kitbots shooter further up than it had to be in order to maintain that perception.