Which HAB level is your team planning to start the match on?
- Starting on level 2
- Starting on level 1
0 voters
Do you think the extra three points are worth the disorientation and bashing of your robot?
1 Like
I hope my alliance partners want to show off their level 2 capabilities. I’m happy to defer to them… I only see us jumping off level 2 when we’re expecting a close match. Obviously we’ve built the robot to be robust enough to take the beating, but I see little reason to subject a robot to that kind of punishment every match.
7 Likes
I want the 5 point hatch auto, not worth potentially screwing that up by full sending off level 2.
1 Like
We’re planning to wait until the end of the match to try to break the robot, by climbing to 3.
11 Likes
#level3sandstorm
4 Likes
We haven’t gotten around to figuring out what happens when you charge our robot off an 11" drop yet…
We are gonna start on level 3. We feel as though it provides more opportunity to heckin huck it breh. Just gonna send it ya dig?
4 Likes
I know from personal experience (2013) that robots can take a MUCH larger drop and still drive away with no damage.
I also know from experience (2016) that robots can survive repeated high speed shocks and jumps.
I’m not worried about going off level 2, especially since my driver will be able to correct any issues with getting the auto points.
4 Likes
I know from personal experience last year that falling down a ways can do some serious damage, if you didn’t design the robot to take it. We had a hook failure…it wasn’t pretty.
But if you build the robot with the idea in mind of it falling off a cliff regularly, then you’ll be fine.
It’s always interesting to see what interesting things your team comes up with 
Our VEXpro plastic mecanum wheels probably won’t be able to survive an entire competition of falling off the platform, so we plan on starting from level 1.
Make sure you have a good chain tensioning system on your chassis if you plan on starting on level 2 at all.
The wear and tear of getting off of level 2 will loosen everything up, and you should have good pre/post match checklists to tighten chain, inspect for breakages, etc.
3 Likes
The easiest way to avoid this issue is to just not use chain 
With the way CD usually polls on these kind of questions and with the number of votes I’m actually pretty surprised how many teams plan on starting from level 1.
With that said we’ll be starting on level 2, and we’ll be getting back onto level 2 at the end the same way we go down 
. We’ve actually chosen to use steel hex shaft for our wheel axels this year to make sure they can take the abuse…made from 5/8’s precision ground steel rod
We have designed our drivetrain to be able to take a beating (larger tube, pneumatic tires, reinforced bearing blocks for the tube), while only weighing maybe 8 ounces heavier than last year.
We aren’t that concerned with this ability hurting our performance during the match and are unsure why it would. As local teams probably know, and we get this comment often, we over build robots. We typically design a robot that mechanically, could hold up for multiple seasons as long as we replaced the motors (still learning how to not be so aggressive with drivetrain).
With our strong drive team, and the drop only being 6 inches, I feel those three points are going to be important further into competition season. With a gyro, target tracking and line following, I believe that any error due to the drop will be corrected during deploying. We also can manually override an auto mode so if necessary our drivers can take over.
1 Like