Is your team going with ground pickup even though the orientation could be different each time? Or are you going with station pickup?
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Some food for thought: in 2019 (another game with a short cycle distance and a weird game piece), picking up hatches off the floor ended up being a waste of time because it was just faster to get one from the HP.
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right now, running a station pickup for our two district events and then a ground intake for dcmp/champs seems like a strategy.
unlike hatch panels in 2019, the human player feeding this year seems to take more time and could be more susceptible to defense at higher levels of play.
we’ll probably steal another team’s redirect system.
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You do have to remember that robots were slower 6 years ago. Meta could possibly change especially with a ton more swerve bots out there.
Absolutely. Robots are harder/better/faster/stronger or whatever Daft Punk said. But increased speed would apply equally to picking up off the floor more efficiently or just running faster HP cycles.
On that note: I think that basically no one should bother picking up the upright coral. It’s just not worth it.
If I’m trying to build simple this year, I’m probably HP feeding a single-angle coral mech on an elevator, finding a way to knock algae out of the reef, and then building a small algae mech to grab them off the floor and put them into the processor. Maybe I’ll shallow climb as well.
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I suppose the brushes that held the hatches in aided in a lower number of dropped hatches unlike 2017 gears.
I think ground is better. It means you can still collect from the source by just letting it fall to the ground, and it also means you can collect during auto, which you can’t do if you only have station pick-up
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Why not? With a well trained HP and some programming, it’s very possible.
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True. My point is that I think ground pick up will be more reliable, and will have more use cases. If the robot misses the coral, ground pick up would be able to immediately pick it up and try again. Whilst with station pick up you’d have to go back to the source before trying again. In addition it would still be easier to implement in auto
Maybe.
However the Coral Station is much closer than the source was in Crescendo, it would take a swerve only ~1.5 seconds to go back to it. The coral may not even fall on the ground, it may fall to the middle of the reef where it is inaccessible.
Also ground pickup for the Coral Station would mean that the Coral would be bouncing and rolling away, which would take more time than simply lining up and intaking the coral from the coral station directly.
Because the corals would be rolling away in auto, that would be harder to implement, it introduces a lot of inconsistency! The only other plan would be to get the coral with the algae on top, and that requires the intake to have much different capabilities (coral is standing upright).
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Any type of ground pickup for coral will have to be over the bumper. Rules and the dimensions of the coral make it impossible to do an under the bumper/through bumper style.
If you are already going outside of the frame and over the bumper, why go down only instead of up and down? If you design it right you can do a OTB floor intake from the ground and feed from the station both. It adds complexity but it’s a massive advantage. There will be Corals on the ground even if your alliance is all feeding only.
A. Feeding means longer cycles, instead of taking what you find mid-field or stealing away from your opponents.
B. Some coral and algae start on the ground stacked up and if you don’t pick them up and use them your opposing alliance will.
C. This mechanism can stop midway to drop things safely into the trough with slightly more precision. The KitBot ramp with wheels works, but there is that one orientation they show in the video where it just barely makes it and if someone hits you (even an alliance mate) I can see that falling to the ground and clogging the area around the reef with a hard to reach Coral pressed against the wall.
So as per usual why not both?
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