Week 1 Thoughts

Competition
1

My team (2614-Mountaineer Area RoboticS) recently competed at the Palmetto regional. We ranked 3rd and ended as the captains of the finalist alliance. Considering where we were just a few weeks ago, I’m pretty happy with our performance. I kept some notes on some expected and unexpected things that occurred during the progression of the event, and since I wasn’t exactly available to keep watch on the other Week 1 events, I’m hoping people will also tag on experiences and notes on their own Week 1 event.

Be prepared for Power Cell wear and tear
At the beginning of the event, the power cells were new and there weren’t any issues. The first quals match of the event we shredded the ball and coated our robot in sprinkles of what 694 called ‘lemon zest’ but with a little extra pulp. By the end of the event every available power cell had some kind of deformity, ranging from giant gashes to minor holes and cuts. Teams who didn’t prepare for the drastic variance in rate of compression saw issues with making it into the upper port at all. There were very few replacements but at least by the end most of the balls were the same level of ruined, so inconsistent compression was less of an issue. I’m very curious to see how the condition changes from event-to-event and whether or not FIRST will be better with having enough gamepieces for replacements.

Failure state of Human Player Station
If the balls roll too slow down the lower ports, they may stop before exiting completely. There was no way to fix this from what I could see besides putting another ball in. StuyPulse’s human player had some way of shooting the balls out, but I’m not quite sure how.

IMG_1697
IMG_16973024×4032 3.73 MB

Week 1 Defense
Typical matches would have 1-2 main scoring robots with a third bot low cycling and/or playing defense. Week 1 isn’t a good show of prevalence due to a lot of robots not being fully completed and thus going the defense route, but by elims this pattern continued. Most teams were more scared of the trench than the target and loading zones despite the majority of tech fouls coming from them. It was easier to mess up teams who didn’t have an auto-targeting turret on their robot since it only took a nudge on the corner to ruin alignment.

Climbs really matter
Having a consistent climb will primarily determine ranking- the top ranking teams at Palmetto all had consistent climbers. While a couple alliances (ours included) got away with only having a double climb, I fully expect alliances at later events to need a triple climb to stay competitive.

Picking
We picked based on climb and auto scoring. Especially for later events, a robot who cannot climb and/or does not have at least a 3 ball high auto or equivalent isn’t able to be picked in my mind- unless you’re banking on a partner having a buddy climb.

Specific Design
Robots only really need to climb on 1 hook, and it doesn’t need to detach and winch. An everybot climber will work wonders. Our robot was able to roll on the bar to make it level, which was helpful if a climb was botched. But, the bar was surprisingly level when 2 robots blindly climbed at about the same distance. When we did need to correct, it was usually by a small amount. Robots who can consistently buddy climb will be able to ensure RP and can pick with more leeway. I didn’t see a huge difference between tall and short robots besides the better angle for long shots, but the best shooters did all happen to be tall bots. Interior indexing was definitely faster than exterior indexing. We went with the latter using some of 125’s 3DP mecanums, but will likely make the switch before Smoky. Inertial wheels on a flywheel also do wonders for unloading a magazine quickly. While that may be obvious, you can see the comparison between us and 108, who were very similar to us but used them.

Higher levels of play
Due to the prevalence of climbers in the top 16 ranks, teams will differentiate themselves based on their autonomous and teleop points. Good teams had a >3 ball auto. The best teams had multiple consistent 6 ball autos that could mesh well with other autos. I expect those numbers to increase as the season goes on. The winners of a clean elimination match will win in autonomous- or make up for it in teleop- while having at least a double climb.

34 Likes
2

It’s gon be tough for us fellas in the later season

3 Likes
3

It sounds pretty much challenging.

4

In response to the power cell issue- at our FIT district event (Greenville), a team used a piece of aluminum to ensure the balls were cleared out of the hole if they got stuck. I can’t verify team number, but it was done.

5

The following our some things I noticed from our Week 1 Glacier Peak district event:

Defense
Like mentioned, defense very effective against teams without auto targeting, and even to an extent teams that did. Tech fouls were also quite common, and had the ability to pile up rapidly. The ability to shoot accurately from the trench as such became very strong.

Climbing
Climbs win matches. A solo balanced climb is worth the equivalent of 20 cells shot into the outer goal. The ability to shoot 4 full cycles in the time it takes to climb was almost, if never, seen. However, there were many climbs that were invalidated due to touching other parked robots. Teams seemed to catch onto this quite early though, and strategy talks often involved having non-climber robots to avoid the rendezvous point entirely. Most top ranked teams at the event had consistent climbers, so prioritize climbing if your team is eyeing an alliance captain spot.

Power Cell Wear
Power cells got ripped or gouged quite often, however, don’t expect them to be replaced much at all. From just a visual observation, this had a larger impact on auto routines, as teams often had very specific locations they wanted to shoot from. Different ball compressions due to tearing meant that teams are often flipping a coin as to whether the shot would go in or not. I would suggest upping shot power during testing to account for the faster rates of compression.

Human Player Station
I personally didn’t see too much of the use of the player station. At non-high levels of play, intakes often couldn’t outpace the amount of cells that were on the field. At high levels of play, a feedback loop of power cells would occur. Top trench bots however often cycled from the feeder to shooting from the trench. At our event, little defense was played against such bots, and the defense that did happen was prone to fouls. Once again, good trench shooters will be very strong at week 1.

Auto
A consistent high goal auto is very strong. Even if it’s just a 3 ball auto, the ability to get at least 12 points (and often more due to inner goal shots) + 5 points for initiation line separated the mediocre teams from the better teams. While top teams may have 6-10 ball autos, they are very reliant on alliance partners not interfering. Expect most teams to have only one auto routine, and as such, I would suggest consistency and versatility over a high volume of balls. Trench bots benefited greatly in auto, as the the trench balls were often very consistent to both pick up, as well as shoot from. As of week 1, climb and a consistent auto seem to be the biggest factors in determining performance and placement.

4 Likes
6

Was this on the robot? Was it in a fixed position or was it articulated to “dig the ball out”? I doubt that the human player would be allowed to stick something in the chute.

1 Like
7

I noticed a lot of the same thing. Throughout the event, I only saw one time where teams were actually able to utilize the control panel. Many of the robots were not able to get to that level of power cells to use their contraptions that made for that. I does kinda make sense though that because it was the 1st week, it makes sense that not many were able to do it, just because it was early or things weren’t completed, but still I expected a little more of that.

3 Likes
8

I noticed that we had a lot of issues at our first comp, but hopefully we will improve the only issue that I saw that was going to very important to later in the game, is the human load station failure modes.
Hopefully kinks are worked out for other comps

2 Likes
9

It was the human player. Again, I’m not sure how it happened or got approved, but I saw it while I sat in queue. Holds no weight though since I can’t really verify at this point.

1 Like
10

Rule S6 states “DRIVE TEAMS may not extend any body part into the LOADING BAY Chute”. While there is nothing about objects other than body parts in the Chute, it is unlikely that putting something other than a body part would be allowed. It is most likely that the Referees did not notice this being done.

2 Likes
11

Makes sense. Hopefully they revise the loading station somehow.

1 Like
12

Were they just touching the hanging robot or were they “supporting” the hanging robot? Q&A has ruled that supporting this year is actually bearing weight so if they were just “touching” this was an error of the referees part

1 Like
13

Yeah - I noticed that happening a couple times yesterday in matches. Human player stuffed about three balls in and then gave them a shove to clear it

14

talk to the FTA, the lexan ramp should exit above the hole in the player station wall. Ours dropped behind it and was fixed as soon as it was brought up. It just took a few zip ties and some muscle to move the ramp back into the hole again.

4 Likes
15

If your put a color sensor on your robot, either dump it or make sure it doesn’t give you constant error messages.
We experienced 19 brownouts in a match because of it. Other teams experienced issues with their Rio as a result.
Make no mistake, 2020 is a 1RP notch below the previous seasons in terms of achieving RPs for seeding.
At smaller events, you really are at the mercy of who can or cannot climb in your matches, more than 2017 because RPs are now attached to it.

9 Likes
16

We were very concerned about ball wear and so abandoned the long or trench shot in favor of the up close shot into the high goal. But we still saw several teams able to make the trench shot consistently even with the worn balls.

A good defense was to ride the initiation line & block other bots from getting to the close shot or out of the trench. Force them to do the lower consistency longer shots.

Climbing is a MUST. Our climber had problems early on and it cost us. We were able to cobble together some fixes to finally make it consistent. Our alliance captain broke their climber arm and that finished the game for us. Along with climbing, coordinate the climb with your teammates; a three bot climb was VERY exciting for the crowd.

If you are not going to climb KEEP SHOOTING! I saw so many teams reach the 30 second mark & just wander around. If you’re not going to climb, keep scoring points.

4 Likes
17

Yes, absolutely even more so than I had thought.

At Fim MCC, Triple Climbs became a regular occurance during Saturday qualifiers and the 75-90 points turned out to be a must-have for the playoffs. This really surprised me for a week 1 tournament.

In our second playoff match, our alliance – despite having the misfortune to have the shooters break on the two main offensive robots – still would have won via their balanced triple climb if not for a slew of penalties received after those two robots got stuck playing defense.

(Please do not read this as a penalty complaint: one of the penalties we got was for us accidentally tripping the power switch on 1718’s robot who, if they were still operating, would have also completed the triple climb for them).

18

Can you provide additional information on this to our support channel, [email protected], if you haven’t done so already?

19

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet - if you expect to be able to score 3 pointers in quick succession based on practice field experience, expect to be disappointed. The spacing between the inner port and the back piece of polycarb means that the power cell bounces back and forth a bit as it enters. If there’s a power cell right behind it, the first shot will still be in the way of it entering the inner port.

A lot of the other things mentioned so far are very worthwhile for teams competing in upcoming weeks to read closely. The power cell degradation and how rarely they were replaced surprised me. I had also underestimated just how important it would be in elims to have a triple climb, especially in week 1.

2 Likes
20

I can ask our programmers to do that after our Taiwan tournament next week, or earlier if possible.

1 Like