I’m just curious of everyone’s thoughts on using tank drive for this years game.
It’ll work just fine!
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As always.
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I think that the floor of teams is on average higher, which makes the “rookie” floor lower due to the prevalence of swerve at the mid-tier levels.
Basically, because more mid-tier teams are using swerve, there is a greater disparity in performance between the lowest levels of play.
You either have to overcome the disparity with good driver play, a better robot mechanism, or just buy a swerve
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… And there will be a LOT of poorly designed and driven swerve bots as well. Not sure if it cancels out, but still.
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Tank drive will get the job done! We’ll be on Team Kit Drive again this year. Looking forward to spending lots of quality time on manipulators and practice, hopefully.
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Tank drive would most likely work well, in my opinion, mainly because of the traction required to stay on top of the charging station. This would be especially important because the platform atop the station is small and robots might have to hang off the edges, which makes minimal slipping a top priority and defeats alternate drives such as mecanum or even swerve.
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From where I’m standing, defence is going to be a major player in this year’s game. At lower levels because of the nice open space, at higher levels because preventing score is equal to scoring and it’ll be pretty easy for a couple powerhouses to finish.
So tank may be viable, with good drivers
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On the whole, I think the pros and cons balance out to make it a perfectly viable solution.
Obviously, tank drive has the normal drawbacks, namely no lateral movement, which may be an issue in the community zone for precise scoring. It will also be harder to get into the community zone since you will either have to go straight on either side of the charging station, meaning you have to be lined up with them before going in, or over the charging station itself, relying on nobody else doing that from the other side.
The pros, however, are that you have a very simple system, meaning you can divert your mechanical and programming resources toward other ventures, and you’ll likely have a larger amount of time to train your drive team, meaning they could have plenty of experience to offset the difficulties in navigation. Not to mention that you’re just plain fast, which is probably going to be worth a lot in this game (they say 24 hours into the season).
As others have said, tank drives are very good at defense. As a team that has historically used mecanums a lot, the lower-ranked usually-tank drive bot on the top-seeded alliance has always been a thorn in our side in during finals.
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Nothing at all wrong with the Kitbot for this year’s game.
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