Is your team planning to go under the low bar?
I am not surprised that most/all teams are saying they plan to go under the limbo bar.
The problem will be that about a week from ship date (bag date, whatever), teams will start to discover that their robot won’t be able to scale the castle as they had planned or won’t be able to open the Sally Port as planned or won’t be able to shoot into the high goal as planned and still be able to limbo.
Then comes the hard decisions. Do they keep the limbo and just not do those things they had planned or do they add some feature to their robot that allows the skill but disallows the limbo?
I could be wrong but I think at best we’ll have 50% limbo bots once you exclude robots that have no other skills beyond just being able to limbo.
Callin’ 'em as I sees 'em.
Dr. Joe J.
I agree with Joe, teams will probably get to crunch time and have to decide whether it is still worth going under the low bar or using one of their other mechanisms.
<sidestory> Joe, my Dad (Patrick who works in Tech Org at iRobot) and I were talking about you and your thoughts on the competition at literally the same moment you posted your reply. Crazy right? Go iRobot!</sidestory>
Yup, we decided to not try to put any mechanisms on our robot, aside from a simple ball collector/shooter that will fit under 15" at the center, 12" at the ends. The shooter might hit the high goal. It will hit the low goal.
If we get ambitious, we might think about adding another mechanism…but so far, no one on the team has presented any feasible ideas for how to do the other parts of the game.
We are going under the low bar, and after doing the math, our original design to hang will not be strong enough. We will probably end up removing that part of the robot and worry about the shooter. We designed a shooter that can shoot 16 feet (atleast), and consistently make it in.
For those who are planning on going underneath the low bar, are you considering scaling the tower? If so, how important compared to other objectives do you consider having the ability to do both? Currently, are robot will be capable of going underneath the low bar easily, however we’re unsure if we would like to scale the tower as well (partially due to time too).
As week 3 ended our team has went under the low bar and several of the defenses. We have current plans for several prototypes that could also scale the tower. We have set a priority to fine tune our shooter and defenses. But will be a tight fit but we do have a spot to scale the tower.
The low bar is one defense you can get relatively easily with a short height robot. It’s also kind of the path back to get another boulder. We think it’s kind of important, since it can speed up your cycle time, and help you get enough defenses and score enough boulders to possibly get you two ranking points. Scaling is ten points, and it could be an easy ten points if you’re clever enough to make a good scaler…but we haven’t figured out how yet, and really see the other parts of the game as being more important to do quickly.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out…
These short robots are also light. A removable scaling mechanism should be doable for many and still be under 120lbs.
We are building a low bot that will scale, shoot H/L goal and cross all defenses, in theory. We’ll see week 1 if it all works, I think it will. Plus we have an awesome auto planned
We already almost had this with Robot in 3 Days–late Monday night, the Team Cockamamie robot sprouted a new piece to lower the Cheval de Frise or raise the portcullis. All of a sudden, the low bar became verrrrrrry tricky to manage, usually with a little bumping. Teams had better beware.
Can those robots going under the low bar still:
-Scale?
-Shoot high?
-cross all defenses (except maybe C because no one seems to care)?
-get a 2 boulder autonomous?
-all those answers at the same time?
That is where it gets interesting! 
cross all defences and get a 2 boulder autonomous (which I think is almost impossible without crossing the middle line) isn’t about the height of the robot in my opinion.
I think that shooting high is a bit harder, but still lots of teams will do it.
the main problem will be scaling, it is very hard to put almost 2 meters of climbing mechanism into 40 cm robot (sorry for metric system lol), especially if you want to shoot high and scale the tower.
you will see the best teams do it all, but I think that it will be 20 teams max.
As always, we started wanting to do everything. Scaling went first. Having the low bar available for the go-to boulder cycle was far more important. Note that we must be in a certain configuration (not starting configuration) to make the low bar. It is a configuration we will naturally have after loading and before launching a boulder, so it shouldn’t slow us down.
Edit: I realize now that this is misleading. Our primary design goal is to be a sapper bot (knock out defenses), but we also recognize that the only “unlimited” points in the game come from scoring boulders in the tower. As such, we have as a close second requirement to be able to score in the high goal, preferably over a tall defending robot, which (as a low bar robot) means a high, relatively slow launch angle. After working through a drive train design (weeks 2 and 3 mostly) this is where most of our skull work is going. Pickups are a well enough understood question that we are designing them to also work the category A defenses (portcullis and cheval de frise).
That is good in my opinion because if it is a conistent shooter and other teams are less geared toward shooting in the high goal but can scale and break defenses you will have a good matchup.
2 ball autonomous seems much harder than the 20 point for stacking 2 yellow totes last year and that a 1 out of 30-40 ish skill last year (meaning 1 team out of 30-40 could reliably accomplish that task in a match). I suppose that 2 ball auton is closer to a 1 out of 100 ish skill meaning at most 30 to 40 teams in the world will be able to do this reliably. And as I type that, I don’t believe it. No Sagi34 is right. more like a 1 out of 200 ish skill for 20 teams max.
Dr. Joe J.
its easier than you think in theory, whether we pull it off is another story. I think many teams will attempt it as its 10-20 extra points if you score 2 or 3 balls in HG. Seems to me there is extra time that teams will not want to waste. I would say 1 in 50 teams will pull it off. About 1 successful per competition. I no way is it impossible as there are fixed points on the field for all necessary steps in achieving it.
10 extra points 2 ball auto = 2 HG tele points (extra 12.5% weaken)
20 extra points 3 ball auto = 4 HG tele points (extra 25% weaken)
Since it matters teams will try.
Even then, i expect it to be able to be consistently accomplished by <5 teams, if at all. It just seems to be a task that requires insane accuracy, and requires ridiculously precise measurements, with a less than 5" margin of error (depending on how your intake works), and then being able to score twice with the right precision will be hard.
True but a 2-3 ball auto is orders of magnitude harder than a defense of a 2-3 ball auto. Example, knocking the balls off the center line to anywhere but where the team that is doing the 2-3 ball auto wants them. A multi ball auto might help you capture the tower during quals but I’m not convinced that it secures a regional/championship win once teams can plan out defenses for it.
Teams cannot defend in Auto without reprogramming the spy bot and highly risk a foul impeding crossing. As for midline shenanigans that means that bot is not scoring either. Not likely I’m saying.
I really don’t see the advantage to not Scoring in auto yourself and attempting to prevent team X from doing their multi ball auto the mid line rule and the not prevent crossing rule make that highly unlikely to succeed.
Plus the way defenses are laid out they are on opposite sides so main auto action is opposite.
I guess it could happen however that seems very unlikely. But who knows?