Did anyone come up with strategies that you never saw implemented?
After completing the regional, I came up with one the I didn’t see taken advantage of. My observation was that throwers really averaged only half court. So there tended to be a long way to go to get the rings. On the other hand only two robots could conveniently be scoring. Many of the 3rd robots pushed the rings to the scorers. That’s still a long way to go. What if the 3rd robot picked up the ring at mid court and flung it at the scorers. By quickly throwing them on, you would shorten the scorers travel and take scoring chances away from the opponents.
I saw many matches in our region and additionally many matches via youtube and never saw this taken advantage of.
We experimented with BB775-powered RC plane props and were able to blow tubes about 20 feet in our shop. However, we didn’t have the weight or space to actually put it on the competition bot, and it didn’t really fit our desired style of play (offensive). But the idea of powerful fans blowing tubes across the field sure would have made for an interesting defensive bot (maybe couple fans with something like the 3553 “wall bot”).
A strategy we thought of, but never really ended up using, was to add a kicking mechanism that could punt tubes in front of it, similarly to kicking soccer balls in locomotion. It could very well be lightweight if needed.
Another one we thought of was an “unmovable” defensive robot. It would go between the opponent’s towers, and adjust itself so the shifting gearbox could go to about 4 fps for maximum torque, and then block any incoming robots.
Yet another idea we thought of was to put an angled net on top of our robot, with a somewhat large plate beneath it. The plate would be connected to pneumatic pistons, and when the human player throws a tube, the net would catch it, and we could use the pistons to launch the tube off, like a herding robot.
A strategy we never really saw used, but was viable, was a robot with a fast roller claw, that would maneuver around the field, grab tubes, and use their roller claw to shoot them to their alliance. Sort of like a super herder, but the goal is to get a tube, turn towards its alliance, move forward a bit, launch the tube, and repeat. This method would be the fastest herding method if done correctly.
Tube feeding was a rather underused strategy at many events. When we lost our arm before our first qual match at WPI, we used our drive base to funnel tubes to 40 in order to make it easier for them to put up points. This worked fairly well.
Tube passing was something we specifically scouted for, as we thought it would be a quality great in a second round pick, but I was disappointed to see few teams doing it at our events.
Tube starvation is the natural extension of this strategy at high level play, which was the primary way offensively disadvantaged alliances would play to level the field. This was normally successful enough to bring the match victory down to minibots, as long as you were competitive enough to get the top row. The #1 alliance attempted this strategy at WPI, and did quite a good job, but they just couldn’t keep up with 40’s alliance which specialized in quick, efficient scoring.
The real coup would have been pulling off the opposite - suction (ala team 25 in 2010). Imagine being able to grab tubes out of the opponent’s lane without incuring any penalties! Alas, pulling is a lot harder than pushing when it comes to airflow.
One gameplay strategy that could have been implemented with 3 heavy scoring robots was to distinguish the pegs to where your alliance station is. For example, the far right station would only hang triangles and circles. The middle station would only score triangles and squares. The left alliance station would then score circles and squares.
The strategy is totally flawed but if there were 3 good scorers on one alliance, the pegs could fill up rather quickly with this strategy. However, I still do believe the 2 Offensive strategy was the absolute best.
Actually, it did see use: 2815 used their roller claw to grab tubes from midfield (especially ones near the field border) and run them closer to the far-more-adept-at-scoring 2415 and 1771. The combined result was good enough for us.
Because our gearbox is not a high enough reduction (5:1 reduction), our roller claw is able to spit tubes out a couple of feet
Don’t think its fast enough though… i’m sure it would be possible with the motor with the highest rpm, and then running a really small reduction on it…
Well, I didn’t see any at the webcasts I watched, and I couldn’t see the Insomniacs’ since I was working on our robot most of SVR. That’s a cool bot you have there! We should have been able to alliance at some point! Don’t you hate it when the team who would be the perfect partner to you isn’t anywhere near you?
Wouldnt it just be faster to push the tubes I saw some tubes were pretty close to the alliances scoring rack… I think it would be better to just push it depending on how fast the roller claw is…
Another strategy was starving the opposing alliance of one type of tube so they wouldn’t get a scoring bonus for making a logo…
It never worked out well a hard strategy to pull off.
The ideal robot to pull this off must have their roller claw in pick up position, and be able to angle their arm/elevator to a point where they can launch for maximum distance.
This strategy was imployed several times sucessfully. I know we got burned by it at the Championship. The value of having a smart human player that can throw tubes well cannot be overstated.
The problem came when tubes were along the border in the neutral zone between the towers–you generally couldn’t push them into somewhere useful for the alliance. Pushed towards your grid, you ran a significant risk of pushing the tube into the opposing lane and making it a liability.
There were plenty of teams that did the herding you described. Only team I know off the top of my head is 494 on Newton Field. Check out their matches in the elimination round and you’ll see plenty of awesome herding.
