Oh, I loved that robot. Just can’t push against that 5-1 ration. Glad you were on our side. Best of regards for Sack Attack from your alliance and fellow champions
Team 569
We actually took the latch out so we had the option of unlatching when we wanted to move forward. It never made it to the final robot as we found it prevented us from closing in further. The force was not against the lexan if we were being pushed, it had no purpose. Our final hook ended up being open in the middle. Hope this clears it up!
Yeah, Engineering Finals was actually the first time my team went up against them
That’s what my teammates and I have said
agreed
That looks a lot better than the one in the facebook album, but against the standard of “locking onto the field is never permitted, no matter what precautions are taken” I think it would have been reasonable for a ref to call you on it. If I had been competing against you and had the presence of mind to do it I would definitely have pointed this out to the ref, because it’s likely that this rule escaped their attention and there’s definitely a judgement call to be made here.
I don’t think saying that “Team X did this in the finals, and the finals have the highest standard of reffing anywhere, so it must be legal” is all that sound. A disqualification of a team in the Worlds final for something they’ve been doing the entire tournament is a huge cost to the entire VEX program. It leaves a sour taste in the mouths of not only the team disqualified but also every team that played against them previously and lost, and all the spectators who don’t get to see a real match. It reflects poorly on the standard and consistency of refereeing at VEX’s most important tournament and on the credibility of the competition as a whole. It’s going to become an especially nasty situation if the rule or ruling is obscure and the action is minor, not unambiguously illegal, and doesn’t actually lead to the situation the rule or ruling is trying to avoid. Those are all the case here. The rule was only clarified in a College Q+A thread and the device wouldn’t have actually damaged the field. So, while it might not be the most *fair *way to referee, refs in finals matches don’t have much choice but to rule on the lenient side regarding anything that a team has already been doing all tournament.
Things like this need to be settled in the qualifications. The responsibility doesn’t only belong to the division refs because they are hard working volunteers who don’t have four sets of eyes and don’t know the rules as well as teams do. It’s important for teams to (politely!) point out the obscure rules to refs when other teams might be breaking them and allow those refs to make the call. I don’t know if someone showed the Q+A thread linked above to the Engineering division ref in relation to 2W, but that’s what should have happened. As for what the ruling would have been, I honestly think it could have gone either way. I also don’t think a ruling against the hook would have stopped 2W from winning.
My reasoning was not the fact that they did it in the finals, but the fact that they were NEVER disqualified at any point for it. I saw several robots at Worlds that locked between the gate and the center goal, and I don’t think any of them were penalized.
Technically, the rule that Karthik cited in the Q&A post was a Robot Rule, so the issue should have been addressed during the robot’s inspection.
Ok, so say I’m wrong and attaching was legal. And I actually competed this year, building a different robot than what I planned. It would have the same concept just designing was a little harder when things didnt works so nicely for “locking”. What this robot was going to do was lock onto the center portion where the gates rest using a piston and mechancial latch that would be insanely protected to it doesn’t even scratch the field.
After that An elastic elevator would go up, and an 8 foot telescoping arm would then deploy blocking all the goals on the opposing alliance side of the field, but not only that but raising their goals by 10 inches. Thus rendering the opposing alliance limited to ~14 points with a doubler in perfect circumstances.
What the design ended up being was everything had specific motors and the robot could transport 14 objects at once. It would move all the preloads in auton and then set up where the major defense started. However instead of “locking” it had two pnuematic arms that would swing 180 degrees and rest inside the goals using the field as a counter balance of the 8 foot 4 stage telescoping arm.
Either way the robot would have worked in theory but in application we were skeptical. But if you see where locking would have helped this robot then you see why I would be a little but bothered that other teams got away with forms of locking even if it couldbe undone. The system I had come up with was a much safer mechanism and wouldnt have damaged the field and was insanely controllable. Just a piston up and down.
Which is a fault of the inspectors then, as an inspector I know there is a question saying “there is nothing on your robot to intenionally damage the field” In which case if you were attaching to the field… They would have not passed in an inspection from me because of this:
And If I had competed against someone who had a mechanism who did this as a ref student or another inspector, I would have imediately called them in for reinspection. And keep in mind there were not really any robot changes to the College game, Its the same “plastic block custom electronics” jazz even if it was asking in a college forum it still applies in HS and MS.
I hope that my reasoning is logical and not insane.
End Rant
- Andrew
You’re right that this is the best place to address these sorts of things, but it isn’t all that easy for an inspector to make calls about things like field damage because they never see the robot in action.
It’s not always obvious to an inspector what the intended purpose is of everything on the robot. If something looks like a field damage risk the inspector will probably ask you how you intend to use it. However, there will always be things they don’t notice and unfortunately there isn’t really anything stopping teams from withholding information or even outright lying.
So a robot that passes inspection is not always going to be a legal robot when used according to its intended strategy. Referees, alliance members and opponents still need to watch out for teams that might be breaking rules that should have disqualified them from passing inspection.
How did the robot “smash” through the wall?
was the only purpose of smashing the wall to give room for the goal capper? or was it used to disrupt an opponent’s autonomous?
also, if i remember correctly, you guys used a nz robot in the middle of the season, why did you guys swap to a wall bot? how did you come up with this design? how long did it take you to build and program this robot?
From what I saw in my team’s matches against them, their extensions flipped out from the middle and pushed the majority of the game objects from the pyramid behind them. Basically, it gave them control of the objects without needing to drive around them
Well, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-FFI39fNjY you can see that 2W pushed more of the objects towards us (their opponents). Despite this, it was the CAP that gave them that essential advantage over most wallbots. I don’t doubt for one second that 2W earned the championship title over us, despite all that talk about legality. Really astounding feat of engineering and great insight into the game.
By extensions did you mean the latches/wings?
It seemed too powerful to be reliable, however it seemed like a good concept to pull all the objects themselves. I guess they couldn’t reduce the power without slowing down the goal cap.
agreed:)
That was such a fun robot to watch! Good luck in Sack Attack!
Yes, I especially enjoyed watching the first World Finals match when 2W pushed their tipped opponent into the Isolation Zone. The goal hat was also fun to watch in action.
Did you really…? I thought it was kind of like watching a team do driver skills with no pressure to get any more than 20 point. The game was over before it even began, and the ending state of the robots (1 tipped over, 1 trapped, and 1 not moving) made me embarrassed compared to watching middle school, I believe this was one of the worst games of gateway ever to watch, not because the robots were not impressive (they defiantly were), but because the tactics were non-existent, and the ability of the robots to score was irrelevant.
The middle school finals were a bit boring to me. All four of the robots were peak efficiency NZ bots, and although they were all impressive machines, that match was just like many other matches. And if I remember correctly (the results won’t load on robotevents), there were 2 tied matches in the MS final round. The deciding match really could’ve gone either way, and I think it was determined by luck more than anything else. 2W removed luck as a factor in the HS final, which is the kind of thing I like to see.
That was quite an embarrassing match to play in, especially after we intentionally tipped our robot over.
For those of you wondering why we did that, it was because we assumed that if we stayed up, we would get pushed and trapped in with 10B in our isolation zone. We thought that by tipping our bot over, we would not be able to be pushed and our partner could outscore their partner. 2W was and had to be built so quickly that there wasn’t really any time for any practice (nor did we see any need because, knowing that we would be in different divisions, we would not have to play against each other unless in the highly unlikely event that we both make it to the finals). In the few times that we did drive our bots together, they would push our H-drive no matter the orientation or how much we tried to resist, because of their incredibly strong 5:1 drive ratio. When our mecanum wheels came and we installed them, they were too busy working to practice against our new wheels. Against normal robots, the wheels and a few programmed buttons that the driver could press to make the wheels spin weakly in a direction, thereby locking the wheels held them back, but in my mind, our modifications were still no match for 2W.
On the morning of the last day of competition, our team joked about what we would have to do if we had to play against 2W in the finals. We had seem some of their matches, and in all those matches, they trapped their opponents. We talked about removing our wheels, or covering our tower with anti-slip and tipping our bot over. Unfortunately, when it became clear that we would have to play against each other, we were stuck on what to do. Our strategy against wallbots was to just park in front of them and use our motor “brake,” but 2W not a normal wallbot. We noted that not all bots got trapped when playing against them, but we (wrongly) assumed that they had pneumatic brakes or some other feature. Unfortunately for us, they just pushed us aside before trapping our partner.
The worst part is, after coming back, I wasn’t there but one morning when the media came in and some members of our Worlds teams were there with the bots, my teammates claimed that they managed to resist 2W’s pushing by sitting perpendicular to them and using the brake, and also managed to beat their cap.
I guess I could give an answer but I don’t know if I’m right. Looking a video clip that I happen to have recorded (uploaded here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6B0Ad8bytI&feature=youtu.be), I think they wanted to steal most of the objects and put them on their side.
1 Like
are you serious?
as vex raptors already said, 4 “peak efficiency NZ bots” with no strategy except to “score score score”, is ofc fun to see the beast inside each machine, but is also the SAME beast in every other NZ machine out there
if you like to see games that depend on “luck” to win, might as well flip a coin…
this was the reason we went a different route and came up with the super stacker
and im sure its the same reason 2W made their wall bot
ofc, a “wallbot” isnt as interesting to watch, but hey, the strategy won them the World Champs
The claim that your team made about sitting perpindicular to 2w to stop them and beating the cap might not have been true for you but was done in the quarter finals match against 2W
I’m still puzzled and shocked every time I remember that you guys were picked in the second round of alliance selection. After playing alongside a robot at the CSUN tournament, I knew for a fact that every playoff alliance that seriously intended to win would need a top-tier wallbot, and I was and am still thoroughly surprised that you guy were the only wallbot to make it to the world finals stage.
This robot was absolutely invaluable in our effort to defeat the most intimidating wallbots I had ever seen, Metaljackets and WASABI (Props to both of these teams by the way for EXCELLENT series). The 30" goal cap was genius, and our alliance’s success is owed in no small part to that piece of Lexan’s enormous effect on the meta-game.
You guys should really upload a video to show how long it takes to set up that robot. When they told us we were blue and not red, and you had to re-set up your robot, I honestly wasn’t sure if we would be ready in time! 
I’m glad you guys pulled through, and I’m glad our scouts told us about this amazing robot that was buried in the rankings. Good job, congratulations, and thank you once again for helping us make it all the way through.
[INDENT][/INDENT]You guys played that match correctly. The only real counter to that robot was to be disciplined and do everything possibly to remain in contact with your starting tile. Otherwise either us or 2900 would double our isolation 30, negate a small goal, and you would have no doubler, leaving you absolutely no chance of winning except sneaking by. Considering no robot ever successfully snuck by 2W, Karthik was right in praising you guys when he commented on that match.
[INDENT][/INDENT] The problem was, very simply, that 2W built a BEHEMOTH, and their 5:1 torque, combined with the fact that their robot was so heavy it had to be carried by a dolly, pretty much made them the ultimate pushing machine. The only team that I saw successfully hold their own against them was WASABI’s Honey-Badger wallbot, and even then it was only a stalemate, and the thirty inch cap gave our alliance the edge.
Props to you guys for an excellent match.
1 Like