For this season’s game sack attack, how many sacks do you think is nessisary for the robot to hold at one time? Also if you have already built a robot, how many sacks does it hold at once?
I’m looking forward to seeing how some deal with carrying over 20 pounds of sacks. I sure am looking forward to doing it!
Our current drivetrain can physically only hold about 30. Hopefully, our robot will still be able to move.
My robot can only hold about 5 but it seems that it can still drive if we can somehow get a intake that can hold around 50.
hoarding will not be possible because of how easy it is to block the trough and the high goal
It’s still possible to score them on the starting tile. And I would think that it’s in fact not that easy to block the troughs, these troughs are huge and can be scored from both sides.
I think 10-20 sacks is the perfect amount of sacks because it is doable without making any drastic changes. Ex: Slowing down your drive
The game pieces are about the same as the Gateway objects (on average), but they’re denser. Hoppers may be a bit smaller, and if you only focus on the trough, or only bring a small amount of sacks to the high goal, holding more than the 4-6 of Gateway is pretty feasible in my opinion. I’d say 5-10 is a good number.
I imagine that some person might actually try to gather all the sacks, and I would really like to see someone try 
I have no doubt that someones going to try and hold all the sacks, and maybe dump it into their square, but there’s bound to be them and another bot who will hoard and they will prevent the other team from grabbing everything. Plus 52 pounds is going to be tough to lift. But I agree, I want to see it possible, Murdomeek wasn’t consistent with every barrel in the low goal in actual matches, but it was possible, so I definitely want to see it.
Well, you could use 4194B’s transmission, start with speed and then change to torque when you’ve got enough picked up to make driving difficult. That would probably be around 15-20 sacks where your drive starts having troubles.
Although, even if you could hold that many, it’s not really easy to score them all at once. If you just dumped 20 sacks in an 18" length of trough, they’d start spilling over the edges, I think. I saw some bridge battle footage where the tennis balls wouldn’t fit unless the robot moved to some other part of the same trough to score in, so there might be the same problem here.
True… I imagine it would only be worse in sack attack where the sacks are less likely to roll down evenly across the trough. For this reason, I think that just like in clean sweep, teams with an omni drive will be at a serious advantage over other teams.
To effectively block all of the troughs and high goals, you would need a 25in. high, 18in. long, 12ft. wide wallbot. Is anyone going to attempt it?
I do think we’re going to see some conveyor belts that can hold 20 or more bags and mecanum wheels to crabwalk along the trough as the belt feeds into it, but these robots aren’t going to be quite as quick and light. In contrast, I expect we’ll see more fast, light, and efficient robots that are optimized to pick up bags almost anywhere on the field very quickly, and these might max out at about a 5-10 bag capacity.
It won’t have to be a full 12ft wide, as one of the end troughs will be its own color.
Why so high? Not many teams are going to design a robot with such excessive horizontal reach to be able to score on the high goal with an 18" robot in the way. That would be a CoG nightmare, and with how rare wallbots are looking to be (if there are even any) designing against such rare circumstances seems impractical.
I agree that a wallbot doesn’t have to be 12 feet, but if you give up the end trough, you let a robot get to the other side of your wallbot, effectively nullifying your wall unless you can truly block the troughs from both sides. Even if you do that, the opposing team can get away with one robot focusing on the floor goals and the other robot focusing on blocking the remaining scoring robot while descoring. Low scoring match that seems in favor of the non-wallbot team.
Rather a wallbot doesn’t need the full 12 feet because, assuming a normal robot will be at least 15" wide, it can’t fit through if you leave the end of the wallbot 15" from the field perimeter, instead of extending all the way to 12 feet.
You are quite right. I was thinking of a goal blocker “wallbot” as opposed to a robot blocker - seems like a simpler objective as a defensive strategy. An added problem with a field width robot-blocking wallbot is that even the alliance partner is hindered by it and has no access to bags under the wallbot and to the other side of it unless it has some kind of doggie door that only its partner robot can use.
Personally, I’d rather have an effective de-scorer and re-scorer as each bag taken and re-scored is a two-bag swing on the scoreboard. However, the big problem with that is when facing teams that don’t score anything in the troughs until the last second.
In either case, the wide open field and all-play scoring objects are going to make it tougher than ever to parse out the most effective robot/strategy combos.
I feel like a goal blocker wallbot would be subject to the same counterstrategy I talked about in my previous post. Assuming the wallbot can’t really do much else other than block (may not be true), theoretically the opposing alliance could have one robot hoard sacks onto their floor goal and the other robot shadow the wallbot’s ally preventing any significant scoring in the troughs.
Has anyone here done any experiments to see how many bags can be dumped (as opposed to neatly stacked) in a trough from one spot without spilling over?
What’s the approximate capacity of a 3’ section of trough? Could one section hold all the bags without careful stacking?