I’ve spent a lot of time thinking back through the years about the best (possible) robot by year. I’m not talking unicorn driving game breaking robot. Just a design that some of the elite teams could make in 6 weeks. So here are some of mine.
2013: I’m going to use 469 as my base model with a few changes. I assume they were close on weight so I’m going to remove the movable part of their shooter and lock it into place at either the back of pyramid or FCS position whichever is lower. To vary the shots I would take from 118’s little flipper which seems like it would save a lot of weight… how much? enough for a 1114/ 67 climber hopefully. Giving 7disc/5 disc wing auto, ground pick up, FCS, Cycling, and 50 point climb and dump.
2012: 1717 is my base here with only 2 changes. To save weight first off I would remove everything with bump crossing. With my new weight I would be able to switch the turret 90 degrees to the right from center for both a Co-op bridge and Alliance bridge autonomous. The other change would be a 33 style stinger. 4-5 disc auto, amazing teleop, and wide with a stinger for triple
2011: 254 nailed it at the end. I can’t think of any changes I would make to the robot except the slightly faster 973 minibot on it. 2 tube auto, great teleop, and worlds fastest minibot.
2010: 67’s kicker and drive train (I heard they weighed 90lbs if memory serves right) with a 469 tower on top (I’m pretty sure PVC and Pneumatics are under 30lbs). Imagine the dominance of 469, with a 5 ball auto, ability to cross the bump, and such an accurate kicker.
2009: Tough one with so many different designs but again 67’s drive train seemed to dominate… but I would put the 217 helix and shooter on the end.
2009 was my rookie year so I don’t have any from before this. What are your ultimate robots?
The idea for this thread at least for me wasn’t the best robot from each year. More like if you could go back to kick-off from that year what would you design given the resources of some of the top teams.
Many of the best teams choose to build “worse” robots so that they can get more time to tune, practice, and program, which is a lot of times more important. Even if you can do everything, your robot will likely underperform because you aren’t taking advantage of all that capability.
Sometimes it’s interesting to speculate about what could have been. I think the OP is trying to get some input as to how a “perfect” bot could exist given what we saw during the season. Also some these robots almost did exist. 469 had an almost flawless robot this year, I’m sure if they really wanted they could have redesigned their robot to allow space and weight for a 30 point climber. However I think they’d have to do something similar to your design or 1986’s as a ground pick up + corner climber isn’t really possible. I also think that 233 had one of the best conceptual designs from the start. It had a ground pick up and telescoping shooter to be a 60" FCS. I think the complexity of what they tried to design somewhat limited their robot’s ability this year, if it had been executed as planned though it could have been phenomenal.
In 2012 I’d say 1717 had a perfect robot, I honestly couldn’t see any improvement too it other than perhaps adding a 973 style ground pick up, however their swerve drive somewhat nullifies that necessity. Their barrier crossing mechanism was a single small wedge, it really couldn’t have been any smaller or lighter and took up almost no space on their robot so it wasn’t really a trade-off, there was no reason not to have it.
If I am wrong, someone from 469 correct me, but I am pretty sure one of their members told me at the Detroit event they were working on perfecting a 30 point climber, and it was almost completed. I am pretty sure that’s why they had that empty space of bumper in the front of their robot, its just they never got it working perfectly, so they didn’t bother putting it on.
There was one mechanism that you couldn’t see on 1717 that they had to cross the barrier. They had a deployable parabolical rail that helped them get over the bump super smoothly. I think what Cory is saying is that even if these robots were possible(which is still very hard to do given the game rules), it would have been illogical to design a robot that could do EVERYTHING in this game because it would have detracted from the rest of the robot. The amount of work to tune, practice, prototype, and design a fast 30pt climb, dump, FCS, cycler, and intake is insane. Even if you had the time to build all those mechanisms in the 54" cylinder, 112" perimter, and weight limit, you would have 100 units of robot performing at 50% instead of 75 units of robot performing at 100%.
If you put 469’s shooter this year at either fixed location you suggested they would not have been able to go under the pyramid and therefore a 7 disc auto would be impossible.
2010 if you put 469’s tower on top of 67 their after the buzzer hanger wouldn’t work and you probably would be too tippy to cross the barrier
For 2009 67’s robot base and changing to a 217 helix and turreted shooter would just weaken the strength of 67’s robot that year. Their robot that year was dominant, no changes needed.
On to my ideas
For 2013 I would do a 1538/33 style intake and shooter with a 1114 climber. If possible, we’ve been trying to CAD one and bumper geometry and/or CG is getting in the way.
For 2012 a mix of 2056/2826 with 341’s drop down intake with a 33 style stinger.
For 2011 I don’t think there are many elite robots that could be improved upon from that year, pick one and practice practice practice.
2010, even though they lost I would still go with 469’s robot. They weren’t just a robot that deflected balls, they also had a really good kicker, which they could use if they didn’t get to the tunnel.
2009 as said above 67 no tweaks.
2008 there is no way you could improve 1114 maybe add swerve drive but I don’t think that would be an improvement.
2007 233 with a 71/33 style ramp system.
2006 I have nothing to go here as I took off a year during my freshman year of college
I could keep going but the games start getting more difficult to pick a robot that you could actually build to do everything.
Not exactly. I see a very common trend on Chief where people just casually talk about adding a 30 point climber, as if it’s no big deal. Lots of people mentioned it in the “open build” thread, others mention doing it in season, etc.
I don’t think anyone who didn’t build a 30 point climber, or attempt to design one realizes how ridiculously hard it is. When you combine it with saying “this team should have the best floor pickup in the world, the best shooter in the world, and 30 point climb in this specific manner, without fundamentally changing their existing robot design”, it’s a pretty ridiculous statement.
We spent hundreds of hours figuring out to how package everything on our robot. We severely limited our options with our shooter because of the climber. It was the hardest thing we’ve EVER had to do. By a longshot.
It’s nearly impossible to make all these things work together. I’m pretty convinced that it’s impossible to retrofit a 30 point climber to a robot without completely redesigning multiple sub systems, such as a shooter and maybe even the base depending on how you climb. Even if you planned to add one later, it’s still really hard to do.
Basically, you can say that you think a robot should climb for 30, shoot with 90% accuracy and do a 7 disc auto…and that’s as realistic as you can get. When you start pointing out specific design features of those systems on existing robots that you think would be ideal, you’ve created an impossibly small design space.
I’m think right now about this. If you took 1114’s climber and put it in 33’s bot, you might be able to get it to work if you add hooks to the intake itself. So there’s the actuated arm, and then the hooks that hold the robot after it pulls itself up are located on the bottom of the intake. It could work. 33’s plans for IRI? I wish.
That parabolic rail probably also took up almost no space, especially since that space wouldn’t be used for anything else if you didn’t have it anyways. I’m not sure what they could have possibly added to improve their robot that would be mounted the underside of their drivetrain.
The only dilemma that I see preventing a “prefect” robot from happening is that a corner climber + dump is not compatible with the best ground pick ups, and an internal face climb that is compatible with the best ground pick ups doesn’t allow for a dump at the top, if you could figure out a way around either of these problems you could do it.
It seems like the only practical approach to this would be either 67’s or 1114’s climber base with 33’s ground pick up/shooter-turret on top and an added feeder station attachment that would allow for FCSing.
