I’d like to see if we can find the fastest Traversal climb of the 2022 Season.
For timing I think we would start the clock once the robot is no longer in contact with the carpet, and stops when the robot is fully supported by the Traversal Rung. This would give us pure climb time.
Other options would be to start the clock when the robot touches any part of the hangar. Another would be when the robot enters the hangar zone to climb. This would give us times including lineup which being fast there is arguably just as valuable as any other.
To start, I timed this climb by 254 at 4.76 Seconds.
1678 is close at 5.07 Seconds.
However, from entering the Hanger Zone to Climb, 1678 has the advantage at 10.10 seconds versus 254, at 11.98 seconds.
I like this idea a lot, but I think this is wrong. What we really want to quantify is the amount of time between when a team starts making a concerted effort to climb and when they score. It’s hard to quantify this, but I think leaving the carpet excludes a lot of what makes a fast climb fast and a slow climb slow.
I think this is the way. It’s not perfect, but it may be the best equalizer to achieve time from start of attempt to scoring.
This would solve the “problem” (not really a problem, personally I think they have the fastest climb) with 4907’s nearly instant climb if you time it from when they are no longer in contact with the carpet till they are on traversal.
The “problem” with this solution is whether or not you count driving across the field as a “concentrated effort to climb”. If you do, teams that play defense will have to drive across the field from the opposite hanger side more often and will have an obvious disadvantage compared to someone with a very similar climb that plays offense and stays close to their hangar. If you don’t count driving across the field as a “concentrated effort to climb” then thats pretty much just timing it from when they enter the hangar, which is my favorite way of timing a climb.
I don’t think that we were the fastest climb, but it was very fast, and we uh… cut it very close several times. I’ll take this opportunity to apologize to our partners for the anxiety we may have caused in these matches
So while they never did so, I don’t think anything about 4907’s design required them to charge their vacuum-spring-thing while standing still under the hangar. I wouldn’t count that against their climb time simply because they theoretically could charge their vacuum thing while driving into position rather than right before launching. If there is some functionality-related reason they can’t be driving while charging the device, then sure. But to me this thread is really about finding i guess the second fastest climb, since you can’t really top 4907 mechanically.
Based on that criteria, the shortest time (that I know of) for 4907 was our “buzzer beater” at ONCMP Quarterfinals 4 Match 1. We shot our last cargo with 12 seconds on the clock, left the tarmac at 11 seconds, entered the hangar with 9 seconds to go, and left the carpet at t=0. Actually I believe we left the carpet slightly after t=0 but the release mechanism had unlocked by time zero and it was all in Mr. Newton’s hands by that point.
Still, without clear criteria of what it means to “make a concerted effort to climb” then it’s hard to measure. The more practical metric for us is “how long can you keep scoring cargo before you must start leaving the field to climb.”
I challenge your assertion that this is a problem.
If we’re set on excluding 4907 and a certain other creativity award winning team, then the OP should ask “who’s the fastest mid-to-traversal bar climber?”
What stopped you from precharging the climb before going into the hangar zone? Seems like the climb could have been taken down several seconds that way.
I believe I witnessed the fastest traversal climb either from mid to traversal, or entering the zone to traversal…in our match with 3310. They were still shooting their last shot at 7 seconds to go.
Hopefully we can match that later in the off-season.
Charging didn’t take that long (2 to 3 seconds, and we could have done it sooner, just didn’t want to have the mechanism loaded while driving around if we didn’t have to). The critical time was for the driver to line-up under the traversal bar with the upward facing camera.
You’re right, I didn’t mean to exclude them and originally I had quotes on “problem” that I guess I removed at some point.
Does safety count as a reason they cant prime while driving? If i’m not mistaken they were talking about that on their BTB. I’m not trying to exclude them just playing the role of the devil’s advocate in this situation.
As I said above, this is actually a common misconception with our climb, that it somehow takes a long time to “charge”.
At our first competition it took about 4 to 5 seconds, two of which was running a vacuum pump to pull any residual air out of the lines. By our second competition we’d changed the vacuum pump to start pumping automatically when 30 seconds were left in the match, so from the time the operator initiated the pre-launch sequence, it was only 2 to 3 seconds to winch the piston up the 30 inches or so. The operators had trained to press the button as soon as the robot had fully entered the hangar.
However, the driver still had to line-up the robot very carefully within a couiple inches, and within a few degrees, under the traversal bar, and it was pretty tricky. This is what took all the time, and it was happening in parallel with the piston winching.
To make it faster, we’d have to make line-up under the traversal bar really fast. We had some ideas, like driving up to the alliance wall and backing up a few inches using odometry, or having a flip-down line-up bar that you could press against the alliance wall, and then flip back up before jumping. Both of those have some significant caveats though.
If we had come up with a fast line-up method, then we’d have considered charging the mechanism before entering the hangar zone. As it was, charging was already faster than line-up, and we didn’t want to risk accidentally triggering the release mechanism due to some massive impact on the way back to the hangar.
