Hey, Robotics community! The round up season is just starting to kick in in its initial phase. Just posting this discussion out there:
What are some autonomous strategies/paths your team will use?
I know that the field layout for Round up is more complex than that of Clean Sweep so there are a lot of different ways of going about it:
Considering knocking over opponents’ stacks? Teams will probably find a balance between knocking over opponents’ stacks and scoring their own tubes. Do you plan on focusing on making it harder for your opponent to score during driver control, while sacrificing a 10 point autonomous bonus, or do you plan on focusing on your own tubes?
If your robot can high hang, do you plan on doing that during autonomous? (that would be awesome to see) How beneficial do you think it will be to hang in autonomous, considering that you will have to “unhang” yourself when the match starts?
What sensors do you plan on implementing? Line sensors seem pretty essential this year, but there are lots of other sensors, e.g. ultrasonic, encoders, (accelerometers?), etc. Which ones do you think will be most important and why? How do you plan on using them?
My rookie year was last year and with clean sweep, (with teams separated with a wall) there were times that two partners would clash during autonomous, sometimes with disastrous results. I’m predicting round up’s autonomous will be even more hectic! I’m excited to see what everyone’s up to!
This game more than last years lends itself to having multi-autonomous routines available to run on your robot. As I always tell the teams that I mentor, always have at least 2 autonomous routines. One will be to do nothing which eliminates the “clash” issue you mentioned. The second will be to do that one favorite reliable routine you really want to run. The fact that the field layout is not symetrical also requires you to think about having more than one autonomous routine. For that reason I have encouraged teams to come up with at least one blue and one red autonomous routine.
There are not too many defensive measure you can reliably take in early qualifying matches since you don’t know what you will be up against with the opposing alliance. In the eliminations, it is a little easier since you have seen your opponents capabilities in earlier matches. I have seen teams write a simple defensive routine to just drive ahead at full speed and hope that they move the goal, scatter the rings, or bumps the opposing robot and thereby disrupting their autonomous routine. Most teams however will probably concentrate on actually scoring points rather than denying their opponents the autonomous bonus.
The hanging during autonomous is an interesting strategy. If you are able to hang high while having your partner scores a couple of rings and maybe own a goal or two, you could score almost 30 points in autonomous gaining you that 10 point bonus. If you choose to remain hanging there the entire match then that initial 30 points is almost assured at the end of the match. If you choose to un-hang and play the remaining 2 minutes, then you would have to determine if risking that assured 20 points is worth going after additional rings and goals and still have enough time to go and hang again, especially with your opponent ready to play defense against you.
Probably two of the most used sensors that the teams I work with will use are the potentiometer for arm positioning and encoders to determine distance for driving. Some may choose to incorporate ultrasonics to aid in finding out their distance from a wall, stack of rings or a goal, but none seemed too eager to do that right now.
but if you have a really awesome bot that can actually SCORE (more than 20)
then they would have prevented just that (and they cant do anything else so its a win-win for them)
i think its only better to mess with the other teams auto ONLY if its better than yours
for example:
if you can only score 1 preload, and you are against an EPIC robot that can score 1 preload, and 1 stack (4)
thats 7 points VS 20 points (own 2 goals)
but if you managed to drive forward and preventing them from doing anything, then the score (assuming the other 2 robots had no autonomous) would be 0 - 0
that would “close the gap” by 13 points
so instead of loosing the autonomous, and being behind by 23 points (auto bonus + tubes scored), they would have a greater chance in winning
i hope that explanation made sense
and another factor on why a team would only have a defence autonomous is that because they are new to vex and that is the best they can do (better than doing nothing imo)
