Hey guys. This is my first post, so I’m sorry if I do anything wrong. This is my year competing in a FIRST robotics tournament. It was honestly the most fun I have ever had. I am honestly more excited for the Las Vegas regional than I am for my bday, which is a few days before it. Here are my thoughts on the strategy for rebound rumble. Anyone want to discuss them?
-Lets be honest, the ridges are not a smart thing to traverse. Time is of the essence, so unless you are playing defense, going to other side is pretty pointless. Feeding balls is a decent strategy, but based on my experience it is highly inefficient. Our robot was seeded #2 in San Diego, because we played solid defense, and could balance consistently (we got cooperation almost every time, and even got a few triple balances under our belt). The shave a few seconds off if you are trying to retrieve balls to shoot, but that just entire strategy just wastes a lot of time in general.
-As I touched on before, trying to go to the other side to feed balls isn’t very effective. I saw people bouncing balls to their side without too much trouble… so yeah. not too much to say
-The ideal team: One great shooter, one solid shooter that can balance, one defense robot that is really good a balancing.
On the barrier traversing subject, what happens if there is a ball stuck under the bridge and the coopertition bridge is already balanced?
While I do agree that going over the barrier if quite useless if all your robot does is shoot and occasionally balance, but, if the need should arise that you need to get to the other side of the field, gliding over the barrier like we do is a heck of a lot faster than lining up with the bridge, lowering it, driving up and getting off.
Having been at SD, I’m sure you saw 1538. They got over the barrier really quickly, fast enough that I would say it is almost as fast as if there wasn’t a barrier. Also, if you remember, in one of the elim matches, they had the “ball starvation” strategy being played on them, further worsened by the fact that there was a defensive robot feeding. In that scenario it was important for them to cross the barrier quickly. While maybe not important in quals, it is never a good idea to rule out an idea. This same concept can be seen with the feeder stations of last year. Sure it was slow to get all the way across the field, but when your alliance has tubes being stolen and tubes are being starved, you better be able and ready to make those trips.
Well, at first balls under the bridge were a huge challenge. What we did was use the pneumatics that pushed down the bridge to also knock balls from under the bridge. It was pretty efficient. I forgot to mention I am on team 1661 (griffitrons).
One such situation has happened often: All the balls are on the other side. So, go scoop up 3, pop them over to your partners, repeat, then grab three for yourself and go back to score them.
Then again, we can traverse the bump or the bridge at nearly full speed, so time isn’t much of an issue. Our kids understood that it might be important and worked to design a machine that could.
There are dozens upon dozens of designs that permit bump crossing. I’ve seen robots with 10" wheels cross the bump, I’ve seen robots with 3.5" wheels cross the bump. Some glide over like it’s nothing, others slowly and carefully get over, and some just force it through. But there isn’t much reason not to cross the bump. I can think of more than a few scenarios where crossing the bump could easily be the difference between winning or losing.
We’re not even near the 1114/2056/etc level, but our (winning) alliance selected us at Horsham for barrier traversal and defense. We do it quickly, and it keeps us out of the scorers’ way by leaving the bridges for offensive play. It let us “get the drop” on the opposition for defense and is effectively faster at the start of teleop–critical against dunkers/short rangers. We also won a few qual matches for back court (though sometimes by fouls).
I also saw quite a few teams at Chestnut Hill use it when they were ball-starved on their own side. This is getting more and more common as teams wise up and start blocking the inbounder tosses (which is really very, very easy). Good teams can do it quickly and effortlessly enough to sail over, feed, load up and score. It’s a big part of an event-winning as well as a match-winning strategies.
I wouldn’t rule out a feeding strategy too quickly. If you have two consistent shooters both working on the same side, then the balls on that side will become scarce fairly quickly. However, if you have a third robot with a nice quick pickup, that can quickly shoot balls, then they could go to the other side of the field and steal balls and shoot them over to your alliances offensive side. The other bonus to this is, not only are these balls 3 points for your alliance, but it’s 3 points taken away from the other alliance (potentially).
I would like to say IMHO that our Alliance in WPI was exactly that, two robots that could shoot really well, and a robot that could feed and balance very well. It worked really well, and it was the reason why we won the finals. In the last match, team 190 constantly sent balls to our side, which won us the game.
Props to team 190 and 2067 for those amazing games!
