Now that we’ve seen the results from Week 1, I’m curious to see what peoples thoughts are on the usefulness of passive gear manipulators (IE, mechanisms that require gears to be dropped down the feed stations directly into the gear holder, the robot then runs it into the spring and waits as the human player has to pull the spring up to remove it from the robot).
With the pacing of the matches and the workload/distractibility of airship pilots, I’m personally concerned that robots that are at the mercy of Human players will spend precious seconds waiting for their gears to be pulled out, putting teams with active gear mechanisms that can just leave the gear on the peg and move on at an almost insurmountable competitive edge.
I worry that those of us that built robots with these passive gear systems drastically underestimated the difficulty and time required to fully cycle them.
Thoughts? Will we see robots with passive gear systems winning events? Seeding #1? Playing on Einstein?
EDIT:
For the purposes of this discussion I would like to treat floor pickup as a separate function, I was mainly referring to the ability of an active gear mechanism to place gears on the pegs and leave them without intervention from the pilots.
personally i think having an active gear system will give teams a huge advantage over teams with passive gear systems.
i was able to collect gears from the other alliances feeder station (greatly reducing the cycle time), the middle of the field, and even gears that were dropped by our own alliance.
i even went as far as to pick up gears that were dropped right under the other alliances peg (when our drive station was closest to the boiler).
the biggest thing is not having to rely on the human players for pulling up the peg. i could just stick it on and be on my way.
i think the top gear bots will be completely active.
Yes. If a team has to wait for the gear to be pulled out of their robot, they will probably end up waiting longer, especially considering how busy the pilots tend to be. Deciding to make an active vs passive gearer was an important design consideration to make.
Gear specialists have an edge in this category since they have more space and resources towards building an active gear mechanism (and had more time during build season) since they didn’t make any fuel functionality.
Anything is possible I think it will depend on the best passive gear manipulator where they have a 100% catch rate and if the human player can be quick. Also, it will help by making sure your teams human player is the one lifting the gears so they know that your robot needs assistance. I do think that it’s possible for a fully passive gear alliance could win a regional or district only with 100% climb but a Passive team where some robots can’t climb will not happen. It will be better to pick a robot with a floor pickup without a climber but that is rare. Anything is possible and we will most likely see passive teams at champs. My team is a passive gear robot with a solid climb so we are hoping for the best.
While I wasn’t specifically referring to floor pickup in my post, picking up opposing alliance gears was certainly something I had not considered a viable strategy prior to seeing some of the matches last week. I honestly didn’t think we would see as many gears on the floor as we did. Granted, not all floor pick-ups are equal, some designs will likely be far faster to acquire gears than others.
Do you think delays caused by the airship pilots could be alleviated with practice, or is it just something we should expect to always be a factor throughout the season?
When expecting a pilot to pull a gear out of the robot, so many things go wrong:
The robots twitch at the wrong moment.
The gears fall INTO the robot many more times than anyone thought would happen.
The springs & tips get smashed around and mis-oriented.
The likelihood of the gear being anywhere BUT the tip of the spring is next to zero.
It takes four to five times LONGER for a pilot to successfully get a gear out of a passive robot, meaning they’re more stressed to get the rest of their tasks done, and therefore more likely to make mistakes.
There were plenty of great feeder-slot bots, so long as the feeder slot is within a reasonable tolerance for height. In many cases the feeder bots were faster, but ground-pickup bots had more opportunities for easy gears.
I don’t think it imparted a major advantage at Hatboro-Horsham; driver skill was the limiting factor on gear cycles. However, as drivers improve, I think the time spent waiting for a pilot will become significant.
1257 has a passive gear mechanism and we were tied with a few other teams for the most gears in teleop during quals at Hatboro, 5.
I still think passive mechanisms can still perform well. I don’t think we have seen a lot yet to make a determination. From what I have seen with our bot and week one is that on our full practice field we can be just as quick as some active gear mechanisms.
1102’s passive gear manipulator was pretty good when things were going well. We averaged 3/4 cycles of gears in matches 5/8 matches in qualifiers at Palmetto.
However, in 2 matches human player error in the airship and once at the loading station turned our robot into a high speed box on wheels as the gears fell into our fuel hopper rendering it useless. If I had to redo our robot again I’d do whatever I had to, to ensure that gears couldn’t go into places I didn’t want them to.
Take my bad experiences, and learn from them so you can do better.
I think more than passive and active drop off, the more important thing is having an active floor pickup for gears. The number of dropped gears around the pegs were insane. There were also a whole ton of gears dropped by the opponents feeder station. It should be “relatively” easy to just steal gears from there.
EDIT: Ignore this, I didn’t read where the OP said he was not considering floor pickups in this discussion.
A little late, but I thought I would mention that passive mechanisms can definitely perform at a top level. Our robot was able to grab the #4 rank at the New England district championship and take the #3 alliance to the finals. The key for us was adding a ramp to the top of the robot so that alignment and distance from the wall both had a large margin of error. This meant that the driver could line up for a gear with zero input from the human player and often could grab a gear with a pause only long enough to reverse direction. We were able to do 6/7 gears pretty easily in a match, but we are considering the addition of some hinged panels and a pneumatic actuator for active gear placement for world champs.
*Truthfully, I think driver skill is the main reason we were able to perform as well as we have. We are using mecanum drive with a robot that is not weight balanced, gyro stabilized, or even using encoder feedback. I do not consider it easy to drive, but our driver manages just fine and lines up on the peg very quickly every time.
We built an active deployment system for all the reasons that everyone else who built one did, but we realized early on that many pilots weren’t used to active mechanisms. Our feeder chute does not have a break in the middle where the peg could lift up “through” the robot like all passive holders do. This means that if a pilot thought that we had a passive mechanism and lifted up on the peg before we let go of the gear, bad things happen. At best it causes the gear to fall off. At worst, the robot is trapped, and we waste valuable seconds until the peg is released.
This was most problematic with autonomous. We unfortunately had issues with our autonomous causing us to have a less than 50% success rate at our last event, but even out of those, a number were spoiled because the pilot tried to pull up before the robot had cleared away.
We don’t want to cast blame on other pilots – it’s not your robot, you’re stressed and under time pressure, we get it – but it’s an issue we weren’t expecting.
1073 built a passive gear manipulator, and after GSD we planned to build an active one. However, we just changed our passive one to allow for the peg to fit better. We keep debating whether or not to change it but we have had good success with the passive mechanism.
