Here’s a few things I noticed from Taipei American School’s recent VEX competition.
-Robots overwhelmingly used the dual-tread pickup design. They had problems picking up balls. Also, because they couldn’t reach above the high goals, our 6-bar could easily defend.
-Free balls and barrels often get in the way of robots scoring. Perhaps some sort of brush mechanism to push them out of the way?
-Most robots didn’t use all their match loads or doubler barrels. Sometimes it was difficult to get a robot back to the correct tile to load it. I wonder if walling off both robots from the opposing alliance is a good strategy, because it prevents them from using their doubler barrel and from getting to most of the field.
-Passing doubler or negator barrels over the center black wall is a powerful strategy.
At the Granada Hills CMI regional hosted by team 599 we saw 1437z with enough clearance to drive over game objects. I believe they took home the design award. Here is a video of the finals against my 1508a team which they won. 1437z is the red interactive robot.
Our robot looks similar to this, and probably has the same inspiration. The clearance for game objects is something we knew we wanted from the start. It becomes a big asset if the field is crowded with game objects. Last year we had enough clearance to drive over the movable bases, which helped then also. I’m surprised that more teams don’t do this.
Yes, at the Granada Hills event, 5 of the six finals teams were the NZ World Cup design. According to just about everything I’ve seen and heard, as well as basic logic, this might be “THE DESIGN” for this year, so kudos to you NZ guys and 24C for coming up with it.
The remaining battle might be about optimizing the design for efficiency and gaining driver skill, strategy, and code. I would not be surprised however, if someone comes up with a tweak to the design (or a new design completely) that proves to be a gamechanger.
I know that the World Cup was a loooong time ago for you guys, and I think everyone is excited and a little frightened to see what you guys have by the time Anaheim comes around
Green Eggs has always engineered a robot that can do something for the game that no one else can. For example, the autoloaders, the triangle goals, and goal dumping.
I am not really sure that there is that something special for this game other than being insanely fast. I spent the month of august with VEX parts, balls, and barrels sitting in my garage trying to figure out what the game breaking strategy was, but I’m really not sure if there is one this year. At the very best, if there is one, it has eluded me after hours of thought.
Vamfun, 1437Z was without a doubt the most effective and efficient robot at the competition. Though 1138B won the design award (Were going to worlds!!!) Also nice job at the competition you guys beat us in the Semis, and you guys had a pretty good robot. See you guys at the Csun tournament in December, and good luck. We used CAD to design our robot and we had our entire robot CADed, so i think the judges liked that. :). Again amazing job and congrats on making it to the finals, at such a competitive competition. Results from the competition are below.
we actually designed our robot with that in mind along with easily scoring the opposing middle goal accurately. everyone seems to be focused on speed not accuracy we turned our focus to accuracy. we are however working on speeding our robot up. this is our robot in the red isolation zone. that competition we went 13-0 but id like to see some teams rise to create the fierce competition we are used to in our region (with green egg and all) we hope to eventually make this into the “game changer” but we know were not there yet improvements will be on the way and maybe we can even (finally) get in to alliance selection at worlds
You guys by far had the best robot at our competition. I was very impressed. And it was a pleasure teaming up and winning with you guys in the eliminaton round. (40A). Looking forward to seeing you guys at prembroke.
indeed there will be i cant wait to see your robot for this year
Thanks, but I dont think we were the best team there, Your D team could have posed a real big problem if they picked either 56a or 817c, there was allot of good teams. we made our fair share of mistakes and looking at all our videos we hope to use better strategic scoring and maneuvering. your robot was really cool in the way your arm worked and i enjoyed working with both you (40A) and 40d. i expect your teams to bring us fiercer competition as the year progresses and i cant wait to see what you may have changed on your robot. we would gladly pick your team again if the opportunity arises. i am looking forward to seeing both of your teams on December 3rd. and if either of you need anything feel free to come on over or message me (and that goes for any local team too)
lol those intakes work really well. I feel that many people this year will be copying that intake, unless someone comes up with a better one. I am prepared to go to world’s with essentially 300 of the same robot. Build quality, driver skill, and programming are going to be the real determinants this year, rather than design. (in my opinion)
I’m somewhat wary of side intake rollers because from what i’ve seen, they have a hard time picking up cylinders on their side. That’s why I went with a top roller design for this competition.
I think if you do further analysis of the game and different scenarios, you will find that side rollers have a few key advantages over a top roller design. But I’ll let you figure that out on your own.
