What did you learn this weekend after watching and participating in week 0 events?
I learned that loading gears from the chute is harder than it looks and if you miss one, it’ll stay there and make it hard for others to get close enough to catch the gear in a gearage.
Boy, am I happy that we have a floor gear intake!
What made it more difficult than you thought?
Looking at other robots (as I said, we do floor), it seemed that lining up just right, close enough, etc. is a challenge, especially with fuel getting in the way. The biggest problem, though, was that one dropped gear near the chute = lots more dropped gears.
I think it depends on your robot it’s a simple 1 sec task for us
Pilots were reaching OUT of the porthole to grab gears occasionally.
Floor pickup of gears will be a valuable asset.
Field reset is going to take a while if teams don’t shoot and keep dumping hoppers.
Lining up to the hopper quickly and efficiently requires some driver practice so that your drivers are used to the distance and angle of the loading station from the driver stations (this applies to any other task that requires manual driver control and precision: scoring a gear, lining up for a climb, getting in position to shoot).
We did find that sometimes dropped gears and fuel accumulates in front of the loading station, which delayed cycle times since we had to shove it aside before our human player could feed us any game pieces.
We were at Suffield Shakedown, which didn’t have official airships, but we still learned valuable information about how our robot behaves, the feel of the field with 5 other robots on the field, and how we can improve upon ourselves.
I think the next challenges we will face will be dealing with the visibility of the field and driving through areas we cannot see comfortably from the driver station. During one match our robot was able to cycle 7 gears, but the lack of a defined airship and defending robots probably lowered the bar substantially as compared to an official competition.
Traffic near the loading station is tough. If there is one robot scoring a gear, and one robot loading at the near loading station, and you are trying to get to the far loading station. There is a very narrow gap to shoot through. I am really really glad we designed our gear acceptor to still be able to get a gear with one row of balls in front of the chute. With six quadrillion balls on the field, there is no way to prevent this after a hopper has been dumped.
On gears dropped at the peg: if there is a gear in front of the center peg, that peg is done for the match unless an alliance has a floor pickup. On the side pegs however, it is still possible to sweep it out of the way, but this of course has to be done before you go get another gear.
With all of the traffic and confusion the most gears we got was 5 in a match, and that was with no auto gear, but most other matches we got 4. This is a dramatic drop from 7 gears in the perfect conditions of our practice field. Take this into account for strategy! Defense definitely throws a wrench in cycle times.
Visibility is really not as bad as I was expecting. At the girls of steel’s event, they didn’t have lexan on the airship, but even then I think visibility is fine at the loading station for all three drivers stations, the real problem is the middle of the neutral zone. I could not see our robot at all when it was behind the airship. But this isn’t too much of a problem as long as the robot stays on a straight path and there are no other robots in the blind spot.
A fast drive train is a real advantage! It cuts down dramatically on cycle times, but make sure your electronics are perfect and the power to your radio is ZIPTIED IN! High speed colisions are going to be really common this year, as there are lots of blind spots that robots can pop out of in an instant leaving no time to swerve out of the way or stop. I hit another robot like this going at 19 fps and their radio completely lost power (sorry about that guys :o) and we lost comm once before we ziptied ours in earlier in the day.
The GoS week zero event was great! Thank you 3504!
I was 4905’s driver at Week 0 in NH, here are my thoughts.
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Early on, climbing is a big deal. When no one knows what they’re doing, that 50 points can win a match.
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Floor intake of a gear is a big deal. If things get cluttered in front of your chutes, if you’re lined up incorrectly, if your gear falls out mid cycle, normal gearbots are in trouble. But if you can grab off the floor, things are a lot easier and quicker.
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Shooters don’t seem dialed in quite yet, but I wouldn’t make much of it. i expect shooting to go up as teams experiment and practice.
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Scoring a lot of points in auto will be huge, a lot of teams struggled to shoot or drop a gear reliably in auto. Anyone who can do this consistently will make a big advantage.
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Hoppers are much harder to trigger consistently than just ramming into them with your bumpers.
There’s my two cents.
This being our first ever Week 0, I can definitely say it was well worth it.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think penalties for possessing multiple gears were called as much as I imagine they would be in a normal match, and several gears were dropped at the loading station and in front of lifts. This may contribute to the idea that many teams are very good at gears early on.
For fuel, I saw mainly quantity over accuracy so far, but I expect that to change very soon.
I only saw a few climbers that worked, effectively winning whatever match they took place in. I think this might carry into the first few competition weeks, but it won’t last long.
I did notice pilots hanging the lift handle over the side of the airship so as not to lose it. The lift would simply stay in the up position. I also saw one instance of a rope deploying improperly, as it got stuck on the velcro strap holding it up.
I just learned that at least one official spring is incredibly stiff.
I saw on 3-4 occasions ropes that were “released” from the holding strap get stuck on the hook/loop strap itself, making the rope not deploy. I saw a pilot reach over the railing to release it, which I believe is not allowed ,would appreciate verification of this. (I am not accusing a pilot of cheating… it was week zero…)
I predict that any rope that has hook/loop (read velcro) will have a high likelihood of getting caught on the strap itself unless care is made by the pilot to avoid it.
Can you elaborate more on this? All the feeds I saw, this seemed like a pretty straight forward drive into > release fuel…
We walked in thinking it would be very easy to just tap the corner of the plate, and comfortably sit our robot underneath one of the corresponding hoppers. We struggled to do this. When we tried ramming in at a faster speed, then they would open more consistently. But just tapping it with the corner of our robot didn’t do too much for us.
My observations from the Suffield Shakedown. (also posted there)
I believe most alliances will reach 40 kPa by week 4. That Ranking Point, like the defenses last year, may become a given.
It will come down to the gears and the climbs.
Gear acquisition will be subject to defense in the Neutral Zone and the ability of an Alliance partner who can acquire gears off of the floor.
After all four Rotors are turning and the climbs are guaranteed, the winning Alliance will have to score more fuel than their opponents. The overflow bins may become an issue as an alliance can load the Robots right near the Boiler.
Can’t wait for the DCMP’s and CMP’s to see who can succeed.
I think the SteamWorks endgame may be the best that we have seen in many seasons.
I think the human players are more important this year.
Coordinating with the Drive Team across the field to receive the fuel scored in the Boilers will be a challenge.
Being ready to load fuel from the Alliance station is an advantage.
I do not envy the field reset crews. They are going to need rakes.
It was quite unfortunate when a hopper was deployed in auto and a field fault occurred immediately after.
If they didn’t have holes, they could use vacuums!
They had rakes, at least at the Week 0 event in New Hampshire.
A vacuum hose picks up FUEL very quickly.
This was addressed in Question 167. FIRST FRC Q&A System