Newspaper Article Questions: Climbing Worth It?

FIRST General Forum
1

Hey All,

Team 2512 and 2220 need questions answered for a local newspaper article featuring FIRST robotics! The Duluth News Tribune is letting our teams write stories for a couple of days during the Duluth, MN robotics regionals. One article is titled “Is Climbing Worth the Risk?”. Please help answer these questions below or add your own anecdotes.

  1. What was your first reaction to the 2013 game and climbing?
  2. Is climbing worth the risk?
  3. What are your experiences climbing?

(By answering these questions you are giving us permission to use your name in the paper and quote). We are directly quoting you, correct punctuation is preferred. Email me if you have a question! More info about our project: http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/event/article/id/260285/publisher_ID/36/

Thanks!

2

Are you going to be asking this to the teams while we are up there at the Northern Lights? If so can we just answer them there?

3
  1. Our team’s first reaction was: this will win matches. We figured that, for the first time in at least our 10-year experience, a non-driving, single purpose robot would be a serious contender. We began planning.
  2. After a number of failed proofs of concept, we questioned our premise. We split our team in two and began building a climber and a traditional FIRST floor-driving bot separately. The potential problems made it not worth the risk to put all our hopes in a climber. It also was becoming apparent that scoring with discs could potentially outscore even the best dedicated climbers by a large margin.
  3. We discontinued the climber in week 4 due to the foreseen and unforeseen complications. We added a passive 10-point-hang on the shooter and felt we had reached our perfect balance.
4

Yes we will be asking members at Northern Lights and Lake Superior.

5
  1. Team 20’s first reaction to Ultimate Ascent was general enthusiasm and excitement that that game was based on frisbee. Many of the team members play ultimate frisbee together, and it’s always really fun when passions can be combined like this. When we saw climbing and read through the rules, we were stumped. We felt like a 50 point end game (the climb plus 4 discs dumped at the top of the pyramid) would be enough to win most matches, so of we could perform that one task, we would be dominant. At the end of day 1 of the 2013 build season, most of the team was tending toward this strategy.
  2. On day two, our goal is to leave with a prioritized list of strategic robot actions that are formed around a particular strategy. Rather than knowing what our robot could do, we want to decide what we will actually make it do. Our very large team (~80 students) breaks into smaller groups for game discussion this first weekend to promote brainstorming and get more ideas on the table. One groups presentation changed the course of our season strategy on Sunday. They argued that based on our teams resources, we could reasonably produce one of two robots that achieved most of the actions we talked about as a group. One was the 50 point end game robot, probably with a feeder slot loaded 2 or 3 point shooter. The second was a 3 point shooter with a floor loader that could pick up frisbees from the floor and hang for 10 points. Based on this group’s strategic analysis, they calculated that the first robot could reasonably score 40-60 points per match. The second could reasonably score 50-80 points. As a team, we decided that the second option was preferable because of the score difference, the simplicity, and not lifting the robot 60" in the air. For some teams whose resources allow them to achieve a climb fast enough to still leave time for the rest of the game, climbing is worth the risk. For teams whose resources would not allow them to reliably score frisbees, spending a large portion of the match climbing is worth the risk. However, Team 20 chose not to climb to the top, being mindful of our resources and what we could realistically achieve.
  3. Our experiences climbing have been wonderful. A buzzer beating 10 point climber that hangs from the same location that we shoot from takes no time away from shooting discs and tacks an extra 10 points on our score. Oh yeah, and the structure supporting our hooks actually aligns us for shooting, so that’s always neat when you can maximize functionality of different systems to work together. It really makes the robot better than the sum of its parts. We’ll see how this works out for the competition this weekend at WPI!