For a variety of reasons there is a chance that our 2nd year FRC team might make it to the initial event with just a drivetrain–we are hoping that we can also build an arm that can tip down the bridge so we can drive over it or maybe something better. However, for the purpose of this thread lets assume that we have a fully functional drivetrain and nothing else. How can we benefit an alliance from a strategy standpoint and what should we be doing during robot driving practice to prepare for these tasks. Please give feedback on what we could do from both sides of the field–although i understand we will be stuck on one side unless someone tips the bridge down for us. The more ideas that veteran strategist can send me the better.
Would you guys be able to cross the bump? If you could, playing defense or maybe a ball collector could be good. Help make sure your teammates get basketballs (since your team’s feeder is on the opposite side of the hoops)
But if you can’t cross the bridge, make sure you can cross the bump.
I really suggest that you make at least a small way to score.
If not, the best thing you can do is have a really good bridge actuator, and have the ability to pick up balls and shoot/feed them to your alliance.
If you can’t score, then the only reason an alliance will want you is if you can make it easier and faster for them to score, by going around to the other side and feeding excess balls and feeding balls from your alley to them. You also need to be able to work around opponents without getting penalties, and a bit of driver practice, even if it’s on Thursday in the practice court. I know I’d choose an alliance partner with those capabilities. 
This will make any team a valuable alliance partner. Other helpful things is to have a wide robot chassis so it’s easier to fit 3 robots on the bridge in the endgame.
If you ever need any help, please feel free to ask any teams here on CD, especially 256. We’re more than happy to help! 
Being able to balance would be a good one. How about designing a mechanism that shifts weight (such as the battery or air-compressor) around the chassis for fine tunning. Also I think it would be good to be able to pick up balls and give them to your alliance. Plus you would need an extreme amount of torque since you’ll probably be playing defense.
Do you have enough motors to make any attachments? One thing I could think of is to make a simple collector/dumper attachment. you could play defense on your opponent by collecting the balls on their side of the court and dump them over the barrier onto your alliance’s side of the court. This would not only satisfy the defense aspect you’re looking for, but also make you a viable partner for teams that can score, but have issues with traversing the field.
Besides that, You should focus most of your efforts on balancing. If you are a consistent balancing robot, I’m confident that you will be picked for eliminations at whatever regional you attend. Make sure you have your drive base working if you don’t have it all set up, because you’ll need to practice quite a bit!
The biggest help from us would be a ball feeder, so we wouldn’t have to waste time crossing the field to gather more balls to score. Just shooting them across the bump to our scoring side of the field would help. At this point, I’d choose a third alliance partner who can feed balls to two scoring robots over a poor or mediocre scoring robot.
The other thing is, make sure you don’t get penalties! Your drivers need to practice playing effective defense and ball herding without getting any penalties, because too many will ruin your chances for getting picked on an alliance.
My overall advice is this: if you only do one thing, but do it much better than any other robot at the competition, you’ll get picked. It’s as simple as that in my experience.
If your robot is lacking, then make up for it with a killer strategy. Crossing the barrier should be essential for a bare-bones bot. Get as much driver practice as possible. If you’re coming into week 6 and still don’t really have a manipulator built, scrap it, and devote all your time learning the rules backwards, frontwards and sideways. Learn how to drive carefully and defensively. At competition, have a bunch of scouts who watch where the offensive robots are scoring from. There will be many robots that can only score from a certain area (the key, for example): identify them and stop them from getting there. Constantly volunteer for being the second robot up on the bridge, so your partner can tilt it down for you to balance. Smart defense will be noticed by the top teams and will get you a spot in the elims of most regionals, regardless of scoring ability.
If you’re only going to show up to a competition with a drivetrain, then I’d suggest a few things.
-It needs to be reliable, any failure is going to make your machine completely useless. (Not to mention make your team look bad.)
-It should be able to cross the bump in the center of the field.
-It should be able to climb the bridge - even if it can’t tip the bridge down itself.
-It shouldn’t be full size, make it as small as reasonable, you’ll have a shot of being picked just as a third machine on the bridge.
If you’ve got a little bit more time, and have achieved all of the above objectives then you could look into building a very simple and effective scoring device. I’d suggest something along the lines of a hopper on top of the robot that can hold three balls. Add a simple mechanism at the front or rear of the hopper to allow the balls to fall out of the hopper and into the lowest goal. If the hopper is human filled, it’s incredibly simple to build and use and you’ll be an excellent alliance partner since you can run 3 balls at a time to a more capable scorer.
If you can swing it, throw a bridge device on there too, it doesn’t need to be over complicated just a basic arm to tip the bridge down enough for you to get onto.
None of those things are difficult and could be built with what comes in the KOP and stuff you can buy from Home Depot or Lowes or a similar store. IMO, the robot I described above, would be an excellent second pick for many alliances since it can play a very strategic role when paired with two other capable machines.
Feel free to PM me for further explanation.
One of the better ideas for a robot this year is to go small. It’s ok not to win many matches during qualifications. As long as you do a great job at getting on the bridge and taking up as little space as possible. The elite and top teams will notice and you will be huge come eliminations.
From the OP’s description of their problem it would appear that their chassis is unable to cross the bump and I will assume this when suggesting strategies.
First of all there is “block’em all” strategy. For this strategy to work (properly) the opposing alliance must consist of a good team that traverses the bump. If you orient your robot parallel to the bump and block the opposing robots ability to cross you will force them to use the bridge. While this does necessarily reduce the points, it will slow down the opposition, and you know what they say…time is baskets ;).
That said, a simple modification to the standard C-Base chassis will allow bump traversal and that in and of itself will open up massive defensive and future offensive possibilities. On a side note: a wide bot will be better for the bridge, however it will be worse when it comes to stability while playing defense. Try to keep in mind how likely a 3-robot bridge balance will be. Also, on robot modifications…a simple sprocket reduction for extra torque will go a long way in terms of defensive capabilities.
Often Team 1325 has played defense (usually with end-game capabilities) and to train defensive drivers takes a lot of co-ordination. First of all, the three members of drive team must know every single rule like the back of their hand!! Especially this year!! The way we set up our defensive drive team is:
Coach: Surveys entire field and determines what team to block and where
Driver: Executes the Coaches instructions
Secondary Driver: Is the Timekeeper/End-game specialist
To practice, have the drive team set back from the robot (Driving on Carpet) to get used to being distanced away from the robot. Also have your drivers practice with safety glasses on so they are ready for competitions.
- Make sure you can cross the bridge. (Standard kitbot will do this effectively)
- Make an arm to knock down the bridge.
- Practice balancing on a bridge if you can. The easier it is for you, the higher chance you have of being picked when everyone else sees how easy you can balance.
- Echoing what Dustin said but make your robot small and easy to fit on the bridge for a triple balance.
- In terms of simplicity and still being valuable see if you can make a hopper on the top of your robot with a roller to spit balls onto the floor so you can collect from the human players and take the balls to a scoring robot on your alliance.
Good luck!
I’ve selected a fair number of “boxes with wheels”* as alliance partners over the years and we have good success with them provided a few things are true:
– they understand their role and embrace it.
– they have a completely developed understanding of the rules, but also how the game plays. They need to understand the metagame as much as they understand the real game and be able to interfere with our opponents in intelligent, effective ways. Driving around and smashing into things won’t cut it.
This year, there is a very simple, valuable role a team without a functioning basketball manipulator can fill. It involves the bridge, of course.
If you’re unsure that you’ll be able to achieve a mechanism to lower the bridge, instead make certain that your robot has a flat surface that is, say, 10.5 - 11" above the carpet. Make it 3-4" deep and at both edges of your robot. Now, beyond that, build a taller frame – two vertical members or even flags could suffice here – that will hit the bridge when your robot drives below it.
The idea here is that you’re going to park your robot below the bridge and act as a hard stop for one or two balancing robots. By reducing the range of motion of the bridge, you can make balancing occur more quickly and more reliably. You then need to back away from the bridge at the end of the match so you aren’t touching it.
Want to get fancy? Put some switches or other sensors in place where the bridge will sit on your robot. Use those switches to provide feedback to your drive team that they can use to let their partners know if they’re balanced or not (e.g. if the switches are pressed, the bridge isn’t balanced).
If you could do this and you could position your robot on the field reliably, you’d probably be fairly successful on the field – maybe even top 8 at some events.
-A really tiny robot that makes it super easy to balance three robots.
-An intake/dump truck for defense. Pick up missed shots and dump on your side of the field.
-A shooter that sits in front of human loader and shoots all the balls across the field to be easily picked up and scored.
In any case, make sure you don’t sell yourself short. You still have three weeks to build. Your season sounds like it has the potential to be an experience that inspires and draws together your team. Of course, it also has the potential to go the other way if you let it.
Best of Luck
Bryan
I think that a defensive robot could be usefull, get it to 120LBS with some grippy wheels (rough-top, pasticons, coleson, maybe KOP) and make sure all the meachanum key shooters are completely kept out of the key the entire game.
Get something working, even if it’s just a reversible intake. Pick up balls, place them on the key. Pick up balls, place them on the key. Pick up balls, place them on the key. Oh yea, and the ridiculously valuable “face your alliance partner and feed them your 2 balls in autonomous” function.
Given the multiple pieces to any shooter bot, and given that a single component failure removes most (if not all) scoring capacity, I think every team should have at least thought about this.
How about a quick and simple appendage that can herd balls. A couple of pieces of polycarb that form a V that are flexible enough so you can ram balls against the barrier and force them over. Just don’t make it so big that you could accidentally herd more than 3. In this years game with a low number of balls available a bot that can get balls to your teams scoring side however it is done could be very valuable. Even just keeping balls out of the opposing alliance’s reach could make a difference in the final score.
Be very careful of penalties. Especially being a bot without a reliable ball manipulator, you might get anxious and will try to block every one. That most likely bite you back during matches by getting penalties. Even if you will be on the side of your driver station, things can get hectic.
At the very least, your bot should probably be able to go over the bump so you can assist in defense or pushing balls over to your alliance’s scoring zone. If you could design some sort of simple pick-up mechanism to carry 3 balls over to the scoring zone may be helpful too.
Getting on the ramp would be huge too considering the points may help edge a match at the end.
maybe build a 111-style bot circa 2001? Serve as a bridge balancer and ramp for your team?
Build a small chassis for balancing. An arm to lower the ramp would help.
Sit in your own feeder lane. Let balls collect there (rebounds, inbounders, etc.). Hoard them for your alliance partners. If you opponents try to come in the lane to get them, bump them (repeatedly?) to collect the 3-point foul(s?). Don’t go chasing after other robots on the open field.
Then get on the ramp.