I’m curious to know how common it’ll be for teams to be capable of intaking each of the game pieces without extending beyond their frame perimeter (F.P.). You obviously can’t steal game pieces (or track down your own misses) from the other side of the field without this capability. Who made tradeoffs elsewhere in their designs to maintain this functionality? I’d also love to know what logic went into the decisions that teams made.
We viewed an inside-the-FP cargo intake as a requirement, because in some situations the nearest cargo will certainly be on the far side of the field. Why deny ourselves?
(Not voting on the hatch panels just yet, as that design went into a lot of flux last night.)
This is something I thought was incredibly important at kickoff but has been waning in attractiveness ever since. Yes, it would absolutely be a perk to pick up game pieces from both sides of the field, but it is such fringe cases that you may only see a benefit from that strategy once a match, if not less. I think many elite teams will have this capability, and it will certainly come in use, but for the vast majority of match play there won’t be much of a benefit. In fact, depending on the design, it may decrease intake effectiveness by making the opening of your intake smaller (between the bumpers), but that isn’t necessarily true with some creative designing.
Plus, if the nearest game piece is on your opponents side of the field, you first have to do a mental check to see if your alliance members are over there, or are planning to go over there or you risk fouls. This was the icing on the cake for us to decide within-the-bumper intakes were not a necessary strategy to be competitive in Deep Space.
While there is certainly a benefit to being to intake inside your frame perimeter, a floor pickup outside the perimeter and skillful herding could accomplish a the same goal (albeit, in an inefficient multi-step process) without compensating the functionality of your game piece intake.
You can be pre-loaded with a game piece AND still be in a legal starting configuration AND not be able to pick it up from the floor inside your frame perimeter… all it means is that you hold the pre-loaded gamepiece above the floor, in a way that you’re inside frame perimeter.
Our tiny footprint for light/fast robot rule out hatch intake and we assessed cargo intake steals as unimportant (we’ll herd to our end if we ever need to steal).
Part of picking the light/fast/tiny robot strategy was assessment of team capacity. Easier to do that right than change the frame architecture to squeeze in an under bumper intake. I’d love to do one as an offseason project.
Outside only. We made an inside only intake last year for simplicity, but found it increased the difficulty of picking cubes up off the floor (and made the stack near the vault nigh impossible). This year, we don’t really expect to be taking many game pieces from the other side, and a solution that allows intaking inside the frame would necessitate an entirely different design.
Our arm can’t pick something up starting from inside the frame, but it can move back inside once holding something.
Our students chose to maintain the ability to intake a ball from the opponent’s side of the field so we can deny as many points as possible by starvation. Our robot scores only on the low goals, so if our alliance fills those low goals quickly, we want to be able to contribute with defensive tactics during the remainder of the match.
It makes packaging our electronics difficult but we will manage.
We figured with cargo, they are so bouncy we could just heard them to our side of the field, or to deny the other team of the piece, just run into it quickly to it rolling. We are looking at ideas for a hatch mover (grabs the hatch under the robot) but we would have to drop it once we got to our side of the field and use a normal intake or something.
This is a point our students brought up, but I tend to think this is a slight oversight. Yeah, you can push the balls onto the other side of the field, but then you also have to take the time to pick them up after they stop bouncing all over the place. If you could pick them up on the opponents side of the field you no longer need to chase them down after traversing back, saving time.
They will also be in your way if you try to bring as many onto your side as possible and leave your opponents side of the field nice and open for easy cycling.