…Do you mean 254? I’m going to be honest with you. I would never call 256 a powerhouse now. maybe in a year or two (or by week 5, depending how we do). We’re a great team, but not a powerhouse yet. We strive to be one, and have been taking the 973 approach to things, since they are a successful team we greatly admire, and one of the best teams in my personal opinion, and pushing ourselves this year to do our best. Maybe we’ll be successful. Maybe not. But until then, we are team 256. Just team 256.
Thank you very much for the compliment, but we’re not a powerhouse yet. But, keep an eye out for us at the Silicon Valley and Central Valley, and you can see what we’ve come up with this year.
While I was not coaching or driving (those days are long gone…) it appears to be important for balancing that one robot does the majority of the work. The most effective balancing seemed to come from one robot tipping the bridge, driving up but keeping it tilted, and the second robot pushing the first up the bridge and knowing the sweet spot for stopping. It also helps a bunch if a robot won’t slip down a tilted bridge with no power applied to the wheels.
Hybrid mode really can make a difference. There is the potential to score 36 points. That amount of points can win several matches.
To get a high seed, a team must have many matches where they balance with the opposite alliance on the coopertition bridge. This can not be stressed enough.
Balancing on bridges wins matches.
To win most regionals you will have to be proficient at scoring in the 3 point hoop. This can be done from the key portion with great accuracy.
Balancing 3 robots is possible, and was a major game changer in a few elim matches.
It is possible for Inbounders to make baskets from their stations.
The Coop points are VERY important to make it to the top seed. Team 1684 Chimeras was the #1 seed for the entirety of Friday at Kettering because they balanced the center bridge 4 times.
I can’t wait for Week 2. After watching all of the webcasts (thanks coderedrobotics.com) I can hardly wait until we get our chance to show what we’re made of.
I REALLY need to finish our camera tracking and autonomous code.
If you can’t do camera tracking, just focus on shooting well from the key. I was very surprised at how well my team did without working camera tracking code.
Triple balancing will be difficult, if not impossible. Ove the entire time at Kettering, not a single alliance managed it. However, double balancing will almost always win the match in seeding matches, and helps enormously in elims.
The coopertition bridge is really dangerous. I saw at least 20 teams flip while trying it- much more than the alliance bridges.
A slow (shots per second), close range shooter mechanism is much more valuable than a powerful, inaccurate one. There simply aren’t enough balls on the field to really allow an inaccurate shooter to thrive.
Lining up both power and direction in teleop is harder than one would think.
As an addition to 4, vision can be very useful- teams that could have the robot aim, even if it took 15-20 seconds, for them were much more effective.
Enough robots will have a bridge manipulator that a small subset of teams can survive without one, and still climb the bridge. You just need something else to make yourself useful
Have some way to tell if there is a ball under the bridge you are trying to press down. I saw many teams pushing against a ball again and again, only to have it push the bridge back up before they could get it low enough…
Personal note: at Kettering, it was ruled that [G28] is transitive, same as pinning is. In other words, if blue robot A is touching the key, blue B is touching A, and red robot C touches blue robot B, they are in violation of [G28]. My team got called on that 3 times (same match), and when we challenged it afterwards the head referee said the above. We were REALLY ANNOYED, as it brought us from a tie to a loss. And this was after we had rolled down the coopertition bridge after a failed balance, to prevent the other team from falling off. And the robot on the key was dead, so it wasn’t even like we trying to disrupt them… Does this sound correct to anyone else?
Stats from GSR (comprehensive match scouting): 30/50 teams scored in hybrid
18 teams scored in the top, 28 in the middle, and 9 in the low
Teams who shot a considerable number of balls, accuracy ranged from 0 to 83%
28 teams balanced at some point
some inbounders are really really bad…
Fender scoring dominates quals because few ranged shooters can keep up. And no one played defense consistently, which made for a very very boring game.
I hated Rebound Rumble, until I saw teams 1519, 885, and 2791 play in eliminations. It was boring; no defense, and all the matches were the same. They played the best defense as an alliance I have ever seen in an FRC game. If 2791 kept working, they win the regional in DOMINANT fashion. Their gameplay showed how STRATEGY aligned with good robots that fit a strategy can win matches against teams they are “overpowered” against. Hybrid is super important, both scoring and getting balls from the bridge as fast as possible.
Defensive robot is the most valuable robot on the field, which makes the ability to shoot from the key AND the fender important. If you can’t access one, go to the other. Exclusively fender scorers may get a false sense of dominance if there continues to be a lack of defense in the quals.
Also balls that are worn down go much shorter than competition quality balls. The bane of Team 20…turned a 60% shooter into a 3-basket-the-entire-tournament atrocity. It was repeatably about 3-4 feet high, but we have plans for easy adjustment at future events, and also to shoot from the fender :). Bridges are much harder to push down than FIRST’s battery test implies.
Thanks for the stats, this year seems to have a pretty high percentage of autonomous scoring teams relative to other years. This may be because the fact that you don’t need to drive anywhere to try for a point in autonomous though.
Can you (or anyone) elaborate on the “competition quality” balls? Were all the balls the same, or did they vary much like a lot of teams reported on these forums during build? Were they all more firm, non deflated? At what point did they replace the balls, if at all?
From my viewpoint observing in the stands, the “quality” of the balls in play generally seemed to exhibit general wear and tear akin to what teams noticed during build season. At Hatboro-Horsham it appeared that if a ball was largely intact (no significant divots or gouges) it was used. If a ball sustained significant damage it was removed from play after the match. I know I saw at least two ball-hats.
2018 (HH winning alliance, 2nd seed) had a unique system on their robot that measured the compression of the balls and adjusted their shooter accordingly. Talking with someone in their pits, their testing showed that a 10% variability in compression could result in shot variances of 10 feet.
I’l try to only add things that I didn’t see mentioned yet in this thread.
Seeding rounds were being really boring because no one was playing defense, but I saw a lot of teams playing in ways that were just completely wrong. There was one team in San Diego who failed to balance on the coopertition bridge, so they went over, touched the opposing alliance’s bridge (a nine-point technical foul), and then drove away and ended the match. I don’t know if it hasn’t sunk in yet, but your opponent’s score this year DOES NOT MATTER. Especially if you have robots in your alliance that can’t score, it is in your interest to win matches in qualifiers by playing defense! A lot of teams have some really weird ideas about seeding this year…
Two teams in San Diego had my favorite idea of the week–the 2v2 Qualification Match. At the beginning of the match, they sent one team from each alliance, neither of whom looked like they could score, to the coopertition bridge to lock down the bonus points. That’s a terrific idea. The coopertition bridge is hard, and you need a lot of time to get on it… what is a robot that can’t score going to do that’s worth more than 2 QP?
Our team sank 60% our shots in practice at our field in the top basket. Competition field, in the 7 matches out of 10 we were mechanically okay we shot around 4-8 shots per match and sank 3 all tournament, shooting almost all of our misses 3-4 feet high. The worn out balls squish easier than the ones on the field I believe (trusting the word of my drivers who felt both balls, and the physics that make sense). Our targeting system is unaffected by lighting changes from practice field to field, as evidenced by saving images to the cRio in match to check to see if that was the problem.
The physics behind this makes sense. If a ball is squisher, it will compress more easily. Since less force is needed to compress it, it will mean less normal force between the wheels and the ball, less frictional force, and less speed coming out. A firmer ball will take more force to compress to the same dimension, which means more normal force, and therefore friction, between the ball and the wheel leading to an increase in muzzle velocity. We’re fairly certain the angle of our shooter didn’t vary from practice field to competition, so the only thing is speed…which we can only attribute to the balls. We went to the practice field at competition and used our own balls (worn out and squishy) to shoot, no problems! So we need to find some way to account for that discrepancy.
Wait, does this mean that our robot with 14 inch wheels, a terrible kicker and a bridge lowering mechanism actually has a chance this year? I balance solo in 4 seconds, two bots in about 15 to 30, depending on the other driver. For pete’s sake, we have a KICKER… Let’s just say I’ll focus on defense.
Defensive robots are very effective, so don’t worry. Sounds like you play the bridge great. Scoring in auto is huge, so at least try to do that, even if in the low basket. Also, if said kicker could clear some balls while playing effective defense (e.g. between pins), then you could be a GREAT eliminations partner.
So a good strategy for a defensive robot seems to be just parking up at the fender to stop dumping robots?
Where would be the best place to balance at if our robot is only 90 pounds including battery?
Any other good defensive strategies for a team that has no shooter, just an arm to lower/raise the bridge, I am interested since our team has never been to a competition before :eek:
Can you hold balls so that you can ferry them from one side of the field to another? If not, then crossing the bridge to play defense at the beginning of the match is the best possible idea, but make absolutely sure that you don’t get any penalties. See if you can write autonomous code to lower the bridge in the center of the field.
But, keep an eye out for us at the Silicon Valley and Central Valley, and you can see what we’ve come up with this year. 