[Ri3D] The GreenHorns 2018

FIRST General Forum
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The GreenHorns will once again be taking on the challenge of building a robot in 3 days! This will be the fourth year The GreenHorns will be participating in Ri3D, and we have 34 members which is the largest team that we’ve ever had.

The GreenHorns will be keeping an active social media presence throughout the event, so if you want to follow us, you can find all of our social media information on our website.

We will be keeping all of our video content in one location, and will be posting all of our videos to the Ri3D Youtube Channel.

In an effort to avoid jumping the shark this year, The GreenHorns will be doing things a little differently than we have in the past. Usually we have focused on prototyping mechanisms for all aspects of the game and then essentially just bolted all of our best prototypes onto the frame at the end. This year, we will focus on having our strategic analysis of the game dictate the design of our robot. Our goal is to build a robot capable of winning a Week 1 Regional/District. This will obviously be a challenge, but we’ll do our best!

The GreenHorns are also making a big change regarding the content that we put out. It’s common practice for Ri3D teams to release daily update videos that summarize the daily activities of the team. These videos tend to include a hodgepodge of information, some of which is useful. The GreenHorns will forego releasing Day 1-3 Update Videos and will instead focus our efforts on putting out videos that are saturated with valuable content that maintains a consistent topic relating to the title of the video. Our plan is to release the following videos.

The GreenHorns Strategy: Sunday night following kickoff

The GreenHorns Prototypes: Monday night

The GreenHorns 2018 Robot Reveal: Tuesday night/Wednesday morning

The GreenHorns 2018 Robot Walkthrough: Wednesday

The GreenHorns 2018 Robot Inspection: Wednesday night

If there is interest in additional video content, we can look into fitting it in. We’ll do our best to stick to the schedule described above, but you never know how these things will go.

We will also be releasing the following white papers that should help to further describe our thoughts/processes:

The GreenHorns Strategy Paper: Monday night

The GreenHorns Prototyping Paper: Tuesday night

The GreenHorns 2018 Comprehensive White Paper: Wednesday night

None of this would be possible if it weren’t for our extremely generous sponsors which include the following: AndyMark, PHD, iR3 Creative (the original Ri3D team), North Dakota State University, CIS 4607, and Becker High School.

I’ll be posting the link to our livestream shortly before kickoff. If you have any questions/suggestions/comments for The GreenHorns I would be happy to answer them.

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I’m holding on…

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Here is our Strategy Paper! Post here if you have any questions.

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A few quick questions:
What previous year FRC game did you find most similar in terms of cycle time?
Do you believe ramp robots could have a significant ranking advantage over most teams at early events?
How many corndogs will 254’s robot produce every match???

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Most of the cycle times were taken from various recent games where there was a similar objective. For example:

2016 half field cycles under the low bar were used to estimate teams cycling to the Scale, and 2016 climb times were used to estimate climb times for Power Up. We also considered how teams geared their drivetrains in 2016 (generally slower relative to more open field games) and adjusted for that.

2013 full field cycles from the feeder station to the Pyramid are a pretty good indicator for what full field cycles will look like this year from your Portal to your Home Switch (if that ever became a need).

2017 autonomous times to drop off a Gear at the Airship were used to estimate the amount of time it’ll take to run a Switch auton. We figured a Gear auton is slightly more difficult than a Switch auton this year so we factored that in. Additionally, all teams weren’t necessarily racing to place a Gear like they will be for activating their Switch, so we used teams that were going for a Hopper auto as a basis for our assumptions.

We also just walked everything out and got a benchmark for times that way.

Ramp Bots… I personally am inclined to hate the concept, but I’m having a harder and harder time convincing myself of that. At early events it’s fair to assume that most (an overwhelming majority?) teams won’t have any sort of climbing capability. So a well designed Ramp Bot that enables teams with a standard drivetrain to climb will be huge. I would say the Ramp Bot needs to have a decent Switch/Vault capability in order to be a viable design option, but assuming you can handle your own Levitate plus help defend your Home Switch I would say it’s a very viable strategy. Obviously getting the climb RP would be an advantage in terms of seeding, but I think that needs to be paired with a Switch auton to really put yourself in a good position to be a captain. I think the Switch auton will be relatively common which means that if your Ramp Bot is missing out on that then your climb RP’s aren’t as meaningful.

I could see teams like 254 soloing like 15-20 corndogs in a match. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some 20+ corndog matches.

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Thanks. This is really helpful.

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We would like to thank FRC Team 3026 Orange Crush for putting together our team version field elements! They saved us an unbelievable amount of time.

Here are some potentially useful pictures of Power Cubes in various stack configurations on the Scale and Switch. The field elements were reasonably well balanced so the pictures are a decent representation of what will happen on the real field.

If you have anything you want us to test just let us know!

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Do you have a built version of the scale? If so, can you test how the scale reacts when dropping a Power Cube (PC) from maybe a foot or 2 above and also test this with different scenarios (more/less PCs on either side).

If you can do this that’ll be great. Our team is thinking about launching the cubes up to the scale.

Thank you soooooo much.

  • Cav
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So it’s 4AM here and basically the whole team is sleeping at the moment, but I’ll get footage of this uploaded when I loudly wake everybody up at 7AM :smiley:

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Sorry for the early wake up (unless you were staying up). We’re an Aussie team and we love the Ri3D projects and follow you guys, and others, day by day.

It’ll be cool on both of our ends. We can say its cool we got a response and you can say you helped an Australian team out. Win Win right?

Thanks for this though, you guys are the best. And good luck for the rest of the build.

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IT’S ALIIIIIIVVVVVVE!

More to come soon!

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Here is some uncut footage of our robot scoring on the Scale. This was our third run with maybe 30 minutes of messing around with the robot before shooting.

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NICE!!!

Impressed with how well the wheeled intake does with the cubes.

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I can’t wait to see this robot in person tomorrow :slight_smile:

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Great job Greenhorns. Really appreciate you discussing the different manipulators.

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Wow, that’s really freaking good.

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While we were building, it was always in the back of our minds that this thing would be rigorously inspected by you at some point. I kept telling the team that mistakes aren’t the end of the world because they will just provide even more learning opportunities for teams. I’m not sure that stuck though because it seems like everything is legal, and the electrical is obsessively neat.

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That’s hard enough for a lot of 6-week builds. Congrats!

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Nice simple intake! Wondering if this robot can steal an opponent owned scale?

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It seemed like in the Day 2 recap they you guys were leaning toward a pneumatic clamp to pickup the cubes instead of wheels, what changed your mind?

Great job, can’t wait to see it climb too!