Stop Trying to Do Trap!

Technical Technical Discussion
1

I run an educational design community, and I’ve designed a trap robot for this game and posted the progress here.

It’s unbelievable how many teams I’ve talked to that are going for the trap as a “must have,” not knowing how ridiculously hard this objective is… for not that many points, and the opportunity cost is much greater. Compared to previous endgames, where you can reserve space (2022) (2019), cheesecake it onto a different mechanism (2018), or literally drive onto a platform. (2023), the trap requires you to design your entire robot for an RP and a few extra points around this objective. A single mechanism needs to perform 2+ functions, and the height limit, extension limit, and height of the chain make the design process incredibly difficult if you don’t plan for it ahead of time. The geometry is stupidly hard, but it looks easy. Try designing/planning for it, and it’s so much harder than it looks.

The hang is a bit difficult (not insanely), too, like the basic one. It’s so low to the ground that your bumpers can touch the floor on accident if you don’t plan for it.

That means less resources for the rest of the mechanisms, less drive practice, and significantly more complexity. You are effectively adding 500 percent more complexity and difficulty for your robot for 5 points. Drive practice + better mechanisms will give you so many more points. You’ll finish earlier, and your build season becomes much more comfortable.

“RP is important!” Winning gives you 2 RP, and RP doesn’t matter in elims. In a regional format, you need to win your event to get to worlds, and in a district format, making elims consistently, then making elims at DCMP makes you worlds. Getting an extra 1 RP but being bad at scoring doesn’t do that. Scoring really really really well does that.

Unless you are good enough to be ranked 1 in your event or at worlds in previous years, and you are already a team that can design in a way to be good at scoring anyway, the trap is a trap. Getting picked early gives you the same DP as the captain. The first pick goes to worlds, too. If you’re scoring 2x more than everyone else who’s doing trap, you’ll obviously get picked over them.

Build fast, build reliably, get drive practice, and do well. I don’t want many teams to suffer just because they wanted to do a trap mechanism.

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Maybe this is a big brain strategy to get teams not build a trap robot to get all the RP’s to yourself?! /s

Seriously though, figuring out the geometry is very hard.

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Big FRC wants you to ignore trap
Big FRC doesn’t want you to rank high
/s

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I feel this will be like the 2017 fuel. Pretty useless for districts/regionals, but game deciding at the champs level.

Just remember 3 trap notes = 7.5 cycles in the speaker (without amplification). It also gets you out of the fast cycle path and makes you a protected robot while scoring.

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So what you’re saying is…

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3 traps also equal 3 cycles of amplified speaker.

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As someone who has been in FRC for a long time. RP in quals can determine how you do in elims through alliance selections. We have been on the wrong side of many selections where we couldn’t control our own destiny due to not getting enough ranking points. It is up to teams to estimate what will put them in a position that they would like to be in. I will tell you that we pefer to control our own destiny. I will say one thing, this is a very difficult task. One of the hardest I remember in recent history.

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I do agree, but you forgot the 2 more cycles needed to get the amp full first. That would be 5 cycles minimum.

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If you’re gunning for the 1 seed, and any other top contender at the event has a trap mechanism and you do not, you’re not getting the 1 seed. Conversely, if you are the only top robot at the event that can score in the trap, and you are reasonably competent at the game’s other tasks, you’re pretty likely to earn the 1 seed.

I agree wholeheartedly that the trap is only useful for teams that expect to be fighting for the ideal alliance captain position. But for those teams, it’s a must-have.

See my ensemble RP calculator which shows that basically the only way to miss the RP with multiple onstage robots is to score zero traps.

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That is a fairly hot take. I think you will be surprised once competitions begin.

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It’s not forgotten, it’s just not in the equation. Similarity, you need to climb the chain to get a trap score, which is another non-trivial task.

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I hope climbing a chain is not the design breaker in the trap mechanism mechanism…. A climber in a box is a commercial product now and easy to add.

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Go design a robot for the trap, then. I bet other teams will do some surprising stuff though.

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Yes it is. Your chain needs to be right above the bumpers. You can do it with a 2 stage elevator or a winch, but not a telescope.

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I agree that the trap is a difficult goal. not only is it difficult, but you can only score a max of 15 points with it (bc you can only score 1 note per trap as per 6.5.6 - point values).

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I kind of agree with you about the trap, but the above is not really correct. In NE District, there are 2 Divisions, so 48 teams make the Elims. NE has only 31 Champs slots this year (if I remember correctly), of which a bunch are assigned to Impact and other awards. As a guess only, about 24 teams will go to Champs based on pure District Points.

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For context, the top line is the height extension limit. That’s the lowest I think you can feasibly go (look at the location of the chain), and maybe design two rollers to sneak into it. But then you start being too tall to fit under the stage or break another rule. I usually want it to be a lot more comfortable though.

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Here’s what I had to pull in order to make it work.

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Note how I had to design the entire shooter/amp mech on top of an angled elevator (a lot of complexity), then have to do two handoffs. The chain is almost against my bumpers.

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It’s not to say that climbing the chain is the biggest barrier, it’s just that climbing and lining up for the trap also take time.

If having to get 2 amp scores is a knock on the speaker, then climbing is a knock on the trap. Not to mention, 2 amp scores amplify 4 speaker scores. You need 3 climbs for 3 traps. And 3 is the max number of trap scores you can get.

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19

Climbing the chain once probably isn’t too difficult. Climbing the chain and then safely coming down a few times is probably a little harder

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I agree that the trap is exceedingly difficult compared to recent years, but I believe you can design a robot capable of doing the trap without making too many sacrifices in the rest of your design, so mid-tier and higher teams will definitely work on designs for it. If done right, a trap mechanism that doesn’t work shouldn’t cause issues for the rest of your robot.

Unfortunately, at least at the extremely competitive regionals in California, you won’t seed anywhere near the top unless you get 4RP almost every match. Back in 2022 we went undefeated through an entire competition but were being bumped between the top few seeds due 2 matches where we only received 3RP (we ended up solidly in 1st seed only after beating the other top contenders in matches late in quals).

To get 4RP this year, you only have a few choices:

  • all 3 robots climbing, two of which being on the same chain (2 climbing robots in an alliance is fairly common, but all 3 isn’t sometimes)
  • 2 robots climbing, on the same chain, while also being spotlit (requires a really good human player)
  • some combination of climbing and trap scoring

Being able to consistently do the trap is one of the most surefire ways to ensure you can get that extra ranking point IMO.

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