How will your team attempt to score?
Human player only?
Dumper (In contact with the opponent’s trailer)
Power Dumper (short range shooter up to 1 meter)
Shooter (greater than 1 meter range)
Some other method?
After a week of deliberations what are you trying to do?
Well we have our designs down, prototyped, and sitting in the room. Haven’t decided yet.
Main ingredient in each mechanism…
…magic! and a crap load of luck.
My team will attempt to score quickly, and accurately.
Actually, in all honesty, I’m not fully sure of the mechanisms. I’m in another state for the season (college), so I’m not exactly number one in making decisions, y’know? Last I heard it was a combo of shooter/payload specialist. But who knows what they’re up to now.
We’ve pretty much decided on a rotating power dumper. This will be the easiest and most reliable way to score, from what our testing shows. Shooting it from +1 meter shows that it is quite likely, without a lot of arc, to bounce off the center poll. Granted, this is us throwing balls at our trailer. No real way to tell how successful a robot will be until you build one.
I like that title, “Power Dumper”. Our human players will be shooting but we mainly intend to score through an overwhelming torrent of moon balls.
Our main scorer for 99.9% of our points will be from the HP.
Ok, just kidding. Turret shooter.
good to hear… you had me scared for a sec.
I prefer the term “shotgun” to power dumper…
I was going to ask myself the same question
We managed to recruit every member of our high school basketball team. We plan on having tryouts and the best shooter (percentage after 100 balls shot) will score for us. Our bot will just collect all of the balls and shove them back to the human player throughout the game. We think this is the best strategy overall due to the slick floor.
…Just kidding. We got a Powerdumper/Shooter hybrid going on at the moment.
With 66 votes in … we are pretty close to having the same number of dumpers and shooters…
We had considered the term shotgun but the team likes the term
“Power Dumper”
We had also considered using the term “Enhanced Dumper”
The reason we didn’t use the term shotgun is that would be a slightly different strategy which broadcasts the balls in a wider spread… unless of course you have a “choke” that can reduce the spread of the “shot” (balls).
This could be fun…
84 votes in now and it is rather amazing that the dumper and the shooter are still virtually tied… (counting both power dumper and dumper in one category)
36 dumpers
37 shooters.
Interesting…
How?
Effectively, that’s how. 
We originally were going with a thrower, but its not prooving out to be as amazing as we hoped, so we’re giving consideration to dropping back to just a power dumper design. But we’ll see
Our robot will score mainly under the “power dumper” which would be our conveyor belt type shooter if you will. Also we have some very good human scorers 
Two shooting flywheel system with the ability to “spit” the balls out and also shoot them approximately 20 feet (no real need to do that though, poor accuracy), so look for more like 5-10 feet max with the ability to shoot a few “Hail Mary’s”.
A well designed shooter should in effect be a good power dumper also in the +/- 1 foot range. The downfall to a dumper is vice versa.
We named ours a “shumper”, for Shooter-Dumper.
Sounds like something from the 3 stooges, but it works…
Our original design was for a pan and tilt shooter similar to what we had in 2006. But thinking back to '06, as cool as the shooter was, it took a bit of effort to aim it and didn’t have an exceptionally high rate of fire. We’d score okay, but nowhere near as well as the teams that just loaded up on balls, ran up on the ramp and “slam dunked” them home from point blank range.
None the less, the original plan was to re-do the shooter and make some improvements because, let’s face it… turrets are cool. Even if we didn’t win in '06 (we did well enough, and it earned us our first games on Saturday afternoon) that robot is still our #1 demo machine.
However we have a younger group of students this year, with fewer experienced machinists in particular, so we’re altering plans and going for the power dump.
Hmm… I’m thinking that “shotgun” term might be a better one.
We also have to admit that we were influenced just a bit by this. Way to go 2775… our design is quite different, but hopefully equally as devastating.
Jason
our team will actually be using human players for most of the scoring… alot like how thermal described actually