Now that the build season is well underway I am curious how fuel shooting is going for everyone.
Are you maniacally laughing as fuel rains into the high goal?
Are you the slow and steady type?
Are you taking the shotgun approach?
Are you cursing every third fuel that thinks its too good to go in the goal?
Are you giving fuel the silent treatment because gears are where it’s at?
A poll is above, however, other interesting fuel questions I couldn’t fit.
Where are you shooting fuel from?
How much fuel do you plan to hold?
Please feel free to post anything from thoughts to specs to pics to bench grinders.
Posted this on the other thread. We plan to increase the speed and retain the accuracy, then double it with two barrels.
Edit: Theoretically. At least that is the plan.
If you think about from a match play perspective, optimizing your shooter past 6-8 balls per second is not the most optimal use of your build time. We’re looking at approximately 1.5-3 seconds of gain in cycle time. Even if you manage to up that rate by 2 more balls per second more, which is very difficult to do, you are looking at 1 second of gain per cycle (maybe 5 seconds if you spend the whole match shooting, or more likely, 2-3 seconds for you to get around 140 fuel).
If you have hit this point, it is highly recommended that you focus optimizing other parts of your system. I feel that teams often times focus too much on the shooter itself rather than the process of shooting fuel.
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The biggest limiting factor for most robots is on your ability to put fuel in the goal is going to be the intake/collection and line up**. A combination of solid drivers training, automation/improvement of aiming process using vision is going to be more important than firing at 12 balls per second.
I just want all of the balls out of my robot as fast as possible so I can get back to picking up gears. If half of them end up in the high goal that’s great. If most of them end up in the hopper of a better shooting robot, even better.
Getting a shooter to put balls in the boiler at high efficiency is only part of the problem. Aiming and getting the ball into the robot with out jams are also big problems. One jammed ball and it’s gears or defense.
I’ll agree the feed is important, but a properly designed feeder should not have an issue of feeding 6 to one or 12 to two shooters. You aren’t going to be able to outshoot your feeder.
The shot angle is also very important. Balls will hit each other at the vertex of the shot parabola if the angle is steep (close to vertical) whereas if the shot is lower and more horizontal, the vertex is less pronounced and thus you can shoot at a faster rate.
Anyone want to solve a differential involving the rate of shooting and the rate of scoring?
It’s an interesting problem when you consider defense. One perfect bump can cause your robot to miss 40+ fuel if shooting at 20+/s. Contrariwise, slow shooting allows more time for defenders to disrupt your flow.
Every year, an element of the game surprises me. In 2017, I would be surprised if there were more than a handful of robots shooting >20 fuel/s at >90% accuracy. Looking forward to being proven wrong.
How the heck are teams managing 20+ balls a second at 90% accuracy - that’s literally a ball every 5 milliseconds? What kind of sponsor just gives a high school robotics team a minigun?
To be fair, that’s a ball every 50 milliseconds. Or two balls every 100 milliseconds, or three balls every 150 milliseconds.
But I doubt that anyone can definitively say they are “90% accurate” until they put it on a moving robot that’s driving around on a field, not on some test bed.
Even so, claiming 20 balls per second is a pretty tall claim, even if we allow half of them to miss. Machine Guns apparently have rates of fireof 600-1200 RPM - or 10-20 rounds per second. Teams are apparently claiming to be able to deliver at that same rate!
To me, the more important question is what else are you doing while shooting into the high goal?
In my opinion, the very best teams will have accurate turreted shooters that can shoot into the high goal almost absentmindedly while the robot is placing gears, dumping hoppers, etc. I think robots that have to sit in a very specific spot for a long time to shoot accurately are going to have a harder time than they expect, especially if everyone chooses the same spot right up against the boiler.
The optimism about 10-12 accurate high goals per second is fantastic and I truly hope to see it. However, there are no safe zones, defense will be a thing for sure and I just think high rates + high accuracy are going to be more rare than this thread reflects.
Holy?! I guess there are only ~100 voters so far, but 6-10 balls/sec at 90% accuracy would be an amazing prototype. That would have to include an automatic feed and a really good shooter itself with some sort of PID to keep whatever the mechanism is constant over time.
20+ balls/sec 91-100%… how… One hopper is 50 balls and the rest are on the floor. To truly take advantage of that would require a killer intake and killer feeder system. Good luck to whoever is getting those rates, I expect to see you on Einstein.
