I recently watched a few matches of the Taiwan Unoffical Event and there were several Everybot climbers there. They were having a lot more trouble getting it working than I was hoping. A few things I learned just from watching the video:
- If you have a light robot you will likely need to put significant extra weight on the front of your robot so that when flipping up the hooks and getting on the bar you don’t tip backwards (as much).
- You need to make sure the hooks stay up when flipped the pivot point there isn’t easy so spend some time testing that.
- There is a lot of careful construction that has gone into the Everybot and modifications, while they can see small and inconsequential, can have a significant impact.
- Climbing with another robot in the way (like the link above) will be very difficult as you need to run “through” the bar for this to work which means you need significant free space.
- Teams that aren’t doing anything else (no defense to be played) should probably just go ahead and climb (in case something goes wrong they can try again). It seemed like at this event everyone was waiting until the last 30 seconds but you can start at any time!
Interesting side not it looked like several teams had good success shooting into the low goal by bouncing the ball into the roof. Not what I was expecting.
I would love to hear more from teams who are actively testing the Everybot climber in person and what challenges they have had! I hope we will see some success with the climber at the Week 0 today.