I think this is something that a large majority of teams are overlooking. Staying on the batter at the end of a match is not trivial. It is also going to be required to be competitive at high levels of play, you can’t capture without doing so. Having 3 teams all park on the batter is even harder.
The challenge is made even harder by the lack of visibility of the batter, and the invisibility of the dividers on the batter. If you haven’t yet, watch some matches from the Merrimack Week 0 event. The real field will offer some challenges that are hard to replicate.
I will also say that the RP for Capturing will be extremely rare during qualification matches because teams won’t be able to park on the batter (it’ll also be challenging to score 8 boulders…). The rarity of a robot that can reliably do its part to capture during the end game will make said robots highly sought after come alliance selection.
As the reveal videos start to come out, I’m sure we’ll see most of the elite teams climbing. I don’t believe this is only for the 10 point advantage over parking, I think it’s because they realized early on that fitting 3 robots on that batter is going to be a challenge.
So have you practiced parking on the Batter (or climbing for that matter)? How do your experiences compare?
What part of parking on the batter did you find diffcult? Alignment? Fitting between the dividers? Or backdriving/sliding down the ramp after power is cut?
I have and turning the robot at an angle is a must. Those tiny lips will not stop a sliding robot. We can score 8 low goals in a match alone. So, capturing the tower is a big part of our strategy. We are slightly worried though in qualification matches some teams will be reluctant to change up their strategy.
From what I’ve seen at week 0 events, robots slide down and roll off the batter after the power is cut. This is probably more common for robots with large pneumatic wheels… most of them… there are obviously going to be tricks and effective techniques for parking on the Batter. My argument is that most teams won’t even consider any of the tricks until after they roll off the batter in their first match.
We are making a parking brake to account for this - we tested, and our pneumatic front and back wheel roll right over the 3/4 in cleat - with our gear ratio - .
Speaking from the position of never having done this.
Couldn’t you pull fully onto the batter and then back yourself down to purposefully set the wheels statically against the lip? When the power is cut, you wouldn’t then be sliding down creating extra momentum to carry the wheels over.
Of course I’m suggesting this when the driver is 55+ feet away looking through defenses…but I think it should work. The kids thought I was out of my head when I had them stand 48’ away (length of the classroom) from a pair of back-to-back chairs representing the low goals the Monday after kickoff…and then told them it is really another 8 or so feet further. Now they understand why I did it.
Yea we had plenty of teams play defense on us. A good defender can definitely shut us down a bit but, I think they are going to focus on the high goal shooters for the most part. We also have had a lot of driver practice with a week 0, and 5 practice events with other teams.
It depends a lot on the wheels and gear ratio. With stuff like pneumatic wheels going over the lip pretty much no matter what. The best way to do it is drive on the batter and then rotate or try to drive up at an angle.
Our robot was at the official Week Zero event and didn’t need one to stay on the batter however that wasn’t the case for every robot.
If you really want to end the match parked on the Batter, start planning something to hold you there now if you don’t have the ability to test your robot on a lexan incline between now and your event.
I guess this might be an advantage of the plain old Kit Bot drive train as we don’t have an issue with that. 8" pneumatic wheels, no other modifications to the provided kit and ours doesn’t move when power is cut on the incline of the batter. Maybe I need to find out if the kids actually greased the gearboxes :yikes: We are also royally underweight, so that is probably helping as well.
If you have a heavy end of your robot, park that against the lip. Our robot is pretty heavy on the back when the shooter is up, and stays parked. Low gear and brake mode on the talons helps so if you roll into the lip it is slow.
