I’m very curious as to what everyone is looking forward to seeing at competition or via reveal videos… What kind of manipulator? Climb/levitate? Any teams in particular?
I’m personally excited to see how shooter bots perform as I haven’t seen many being shared compared to all of the elevators and wheeled intakes.
(And by the way- good luck these last couple of days! You all work so hard.)
It’ll be difficult, but I think that a triple climb will be very impressive.
I always like to examine pivoting arm robots. Besides that, multi-climbers (not rampbots), and any cube manipulator that doesn’t use 4" green compliant wheels.
At this point I’m pretty much excited to see anything that’s not an elevator with a 2015 style intake. More specifically though, double lifters. 2590 showed off an impressive one but I’m sure there will be several more. I am curious to see how that changes the game and how it effects the balance between the vault and the switch.
I think we’ll see quite a few powerhouse teams be able to pick up any partner, getting two climbs. Two reasons I think this:
If they prioritize getting the Levitate Power Up, then this will guarantee them a RP every match. Along with the Auto RP, this should allow them to rank very high consistently.
This frees up a robot in endgame during eliminations. If they rank 1st (see above) then they won’t need to worry about picking an alliance that can triple hang. They could pick the (second) best Scale/Switch bot first, then grab a good everybot-type robot as their third pick.
The reason I think this is that back in 2012 (Rebound Rumble), a lot of teams were adding mechanisms to help get the Co-op bridge bonus. The most common was the 33 “Stinger”, but some teams built their robot around that. The best example being 67’s arm that brought the bridge to ~1-2" of being balanced. This made it incredibly easy to balance with anyone.
I know it will happen, I just don’t know how. And that’s what has me excited.
Can’t wait to see how people have been getting full width horizontal rollers to work. My team made some decent prototypes earlier on in the season, but ultimately we went the route of side rollers.
Of course, we’re always ready to steal from the best and invent the rest…
I’m 95% sure that 254 will be attempting to do this.
I was very much against building a shooter robot, but I’m excited to see other shooter robots.
With all the big footprint robots floating around, I’m excited to see a 3 robot climb. Going to be a hard challenge to tackle but really cool.
Im waiting to see a mishmash of things upon each other, telescoping arm on an elevator, elevator on a scissor lift, more tape measure climbers on an arm, the usual.
It’d be interesting to see a bot that is able to do more than one cube during auto.
FTFY
Interesting that you should say this, as I believe the 8th seed will have a better shot at getting 2 good climbers as partners.
That’s something I didn’t think of until now. The big advantage the powerhouse teams have is that they can consistently score regardless of their partners. That’s why I think we’ll see this more because all their partner has to do is drive near them and let the powerhouse team do all the heavy lifting.
This will also work in advantage of the powerhouse teams because other alliances will be picking teams to triple, not necessarily for Switch/Scale roles. So the other alliances might pass over a good everybot if it can’t hang, leaving the more specialized teams up for grabs.
I am looking forward to seeing an alliance that coordinates all three robots to autoscale with one robot doing a two cube auto to control the switch for the ranking point.
254 is good at some things…finishing early is not generally one of them.
Confirmed? 
Small footprint robots will immediately catch my eye. Also, I’m a sucker for #TeamSwerve2018 and #TeamTwoWheelSwerve
To answer OP: I think I have a pretty good handle on what types of robots I expect to see. What I am excited to see is how the robots work together to play the game.
I’m excited to see hella good switch-only robots and catapults. I think both are capable of filling a specific niche at high levels of play and I really want to see some perform at a high level.