Lessons Learned from Early Driver Practice

6045 has had almost a week now to play around with our practice robot. We’ve learned a lot of lessons about our own design as well as the game.

Thoughts from driver practice so far:

Strategic Insights

  • Cycles are going to be so insanely fast
  • Shot alignment time feels like it’s going to be the second longest part of a cycle after drive time
  • The best teams probably never stop moving which will definitely kill batteries
  • Defense feels like it won’t be super impactful against high level teams, but it can be very effective against teams that have limited shot location options
  • Distance shots will only be valuable if alignment time is really minimal and shot accuracy is really high… or in a scenario where you are anticipating misses and have an alliance partner playing cleanup

Game Lessons

  • Intaking Notes from across the field is really easy
  • Shooting on the move feels pretty doable once things are dialed in - we were nearly able to do it as is since the shot is so flat
  • Some Notes get damaged really easily… we had a brand new Note get severely damaged as it went through our robot one time while multiple other Notes went through 50+ times with minimal impact
  • It’s very possible to make close range shots with damaged Notes, accuracy drops significantly (very quickly) as you move further out
  • Teams are going to damage Notes at a high rate

Robot Lessons

  • Over the bumper intake works nicely - our driver likes having the ability to see the Note the entire time (probably a personal preference thing)
  • Our shooter (pretty standard over/under wheel configuration with a Vortex at 1:1) can easily score a brand new Note and a 100% duct tape covered Note from a reasonable number of locations
  • The practice robot isn’t fast enough… really excited to get our MAX Swerve ratio upgrade kits to unlock some additional speed
  • Zero tippiness from this robot - max forward to max reverse is fully controllable without any particular attention paid to ballast
  • Robots are going to be lawn mower loud this season
  • 4 bar intake has been just fine crashing into walls so far
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That feels counterintuitive right? Can you explain a bit more why it’s easier than it looks?

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I think with a decent intake design you just run into them with the intake running.
They’re not like a round ball that’s going to run away from you if you hit it wrong. Or like a cone where you have to grab it in a particular orientation.

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I notice they don’t have any stages built on the field.

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It looks easy on that practice field. Add in 2 stages and 5 other robots and thing will not be as easy. You don’t get to pick your driver station. Some have lousy line of sight. All those notes have low point value unless the alliance can Optimize amp and human player timings.

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Ryan, Thanks for the insight. What Max Swerve gear set are you currently running?

David

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Hi, I have a few questions. 1, are you using a driver cam? From what I have seen it makes it a lot easier to line up intake with reduced visibility. 2, have you accounted for drop time from the source? I think that all the game pieces in the middle will disappear pretty quickly, especially will the 5 and 6 piece autons i am seeing.

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Head on yes, but perpendicular impacts??

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Are those Podium shots that this video is taken from?

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Orange is a highly visible color as you should know! The high contrast makes them easy to spot from far away. The Notes don’t roll away when you drive into them. In cases like ours where you have a full width intake, your effective intake width relative to the Note size gives a driver a high margin for error. We’ve impaired the driver/operator’s visibility and they still haven’t had issues intaking Notes from 30-50’ away. Acquiring games pieces is less of a challenge this season than in many previous seasons.

We have the fastest ratio that comes with the kit installed right now. Programming-wise we’re still limiting ourselves as bit as our driver gets the basic movements down until it becomes second nature. We’ll crank up the speed at that point and start doing things faster. We just bought the MAX Swerve Ratio upgrade kit and will be playing around with faster gearsets.

We’ve been practicing with 100% open loop controls outside of our shooter PID. No camera and no vision targeting. This is partially because it isn’t ready and partially because it’s good practice for the drive team to learn how to control the robot in scenarios where technology fails them. Running “open loop” effectively saved us in numerous matches last season when things went wrong.

We’ve practiced acquiring Notes from the Source quite a bit. Part of that has been human player practice of dropping the Note on the ground at the right time so it settles before the robot arrives, but not too early that an opponent can steal it. In the video I linked we only had one of our two pieces of carpet laid out so we only had like 40’ to work with.

Purely perpendicular impacts to an extended intake are a lot more rare than you’d think. Most collisions have a force vector running parallel to the 4 bars which will cause them to retract when hit. The range at which the intake retracts when hit is pretty wide… something like 150 degrees (estimating this number and requires more testing to confirm but you get the idea).

If we took a hit perpendicular to the intake it would bend significantly before breaking. I expect it’ll break at some point during the season, but I also expect that to be rare. We’ve also had our drive team practice deploying it at the last second before entering the Source which will also help.

No this is from like 5’ away from the Subwoofer. It’s a pretty arbitrary distance based on the angle we set our shooter at. Shooter is just fixed on the practice robot for the sake of simplicity. We can manually adjust our kickstand to practice shots from different locations.

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I think you are under estimating how a good defensive strategy can really impact this game

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I feel this statement to be not 100% true. While yes the high level teams will cover more distance and therefore possibly draw more battery over a total match due to not stopping, I feel that not stopping also makes your robot more power efficient due to the fact that motors draw the most power under heavy accelerations, also being able to move and shoot helps your robot have to do less heavy accelerations and allows the motors to work closer to their most efficient rpm for more of the match therefore drawing less battery.

Time for some research!
Trial 1: 3min of driving in a 5m radius circle
Trial 2: 3 min of driving continuously back and forth 10m.
Compare battery drops.

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Yep. A robot with extended climbers and who’se on your bumpers wouldn’t let you make those close shots as they would be on your bumpers immediately and preventing alignment with the goal.

Might be a stupid question but is there a reason you have duct tape on your notes?

My guess is to protect them from damage during testing.

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This isn’t a direct experiment but after pulling some robot logs I found some data to back my point up. You can see in this graph that there is much more current draw under heavy accelerations and decelerations as opposed to driving at a constant ish velocity. I do agree though that an experiment of the nature you described would be really cool to see.

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Do you have an OnShape workspace for this intake that you would be willing to share?

My point is more so that robots will spend almost the entire match driving at high speeds across the field. This will include changing directions a lot, battling defense, etc. In a lot of other games the drivetrain isn’t in continuous motion as there is a waiting period for scoring/acquiring game pieces. Those actions in this game will be a lot faster, requiring a lot more drive distance per match than most games.

During prototyping/testing we destroyed a bunch of our Notes. The duct tape holds them together well enough that they still function for close range shots and intaking. They obviously don’t fly well for long range shots.

We have a Solidworks file for the intake somewhere… but not sure it’s in a good enough state to share.

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