This week we would’ve competed in ISR District Event 3, had the season not been suspended. Leading up to this event, we’ve made a lot of improvements in our ball indexer and vision alignment, which enabled us to pass the 40 power cell mark pretty consistently in practice. We wanted to share our progress, so this Tuesday(would’ve been playoff day at the event) a small group (drive team+mentor) met up to film this short practice session, enjoy!
The video shows off multiple kinds of cycles, some from the loading station, some from the rendezvous point, and some from the positive feedback loop generated by our scoring, and also shooting from multiple safe zones, and climbing. Total was 48 Power Cells; 24 inner goals and 24 Outer, which, together with auton bonuses and a climb, amounts to 182pts solo.
(We didn’t have much time to improve our autonomous routine, since that was scheduled for last weekend, right after the season was suspended, so we still have a lot of room for improvement)
From our experience ISR #1 I can say that defense has little to no effect in slowing down the cycle itself, as our preferred scoring location is the Target Zone, and our Swerve drive allows us to easily maneuver around/through defense to get there. The two main effects of defense in ISR #1 was making the positive feedback loop harder to take advantage of(fear of generating tech fouls with an opponent robot nearby), and that strong hits disrupt the balls in our tank, which used to cause jams for us, but that was fixed since then.
Wow. This is definitely my favorite robot of the season. I’m glad you at least got to play one event. Do you plan on releasing CAD files or a technical binder?
yes… with defense … we would have received at least an additional 45 points from fouls (based on our last competition results). see you at Chezy champs - you are welcomed to do defense
and seriously - we believe 55 power cells is not too hard… out of which >>35 inner. as @Korny mentioned, we were not allowed to work before this (used the same version that was developed during the competition in W1). during this practice, we had a CANBUS issue that caused random “jumps” in some motors - saw too many CAN errors (this caused the misses in auto and the missing of two balls in the first cycle)… so… we believe that if everything goes well… >55 with >35 inner is not hard
One way you can improve your cycle time is if you can drop 3 balls through the loading station in the first drop followed by 2 on the second drop (instead of 2 + 2 + 1). If you grab two balls, one in each hand, you can grab a 3rd ball by sandwiching it between the two in your hands. When you drop them, they will drop through the 3 slots of the loading station. Judging by the video, it might take 1 second off your loading time on each cycle.
Hope you get a chance to show this amazing robot off in more competitions at some point in the near future.
It seems like a few teams have been successful (Blue alliance at Great Northern finals had some success as one example I saw). It seems like you need to roll your hands a bit to push the middle ball into the middle slot before dropping the other two balls in the side slots. It seems a little faster than 2+2+1, but it is really hard to tell. It is definitely not as smooth. It might be interesting to modify our practice fields to more accurately replicate the loading station and see if you can develop a good smooth technique. But, as you have said, this is not as easy as it looks and in the end, the 2+2+1 may end up being just as fast if not faster.
What we did in competition was use another team’s human player to load the balls in tandem- worked very well in playoffs with 3339’s human player, but we didn’t have enough people available at this practice session
