It’s almost never a good idea to assume that your opponents will play badly. Some of them will, but when it really matters they usually won’t. You should try to come up with strategies that will let you beat a team whose robot and strategy are as good as yours.
That was part of his strategy, luring an opponent to make what seems like a good decision but ends up wasting time. Although I agree, some more advanced strategies than that will be needed to take on the top teams.
And I’m saying that strategies that rely on mistakes like this are almost always poor strategies, unless you have a very good reason to believe that even the best teams are playing the game wrong.
It’s reasonable to think that a high goal top cube is safer than it might appear because the opportunity cost of descoring it is high, but it’s not reasonable to assume that you will gain advantage from your opponents wasting time.
That strategy was just an idea i had off the top of my head. Obviously if the team is very fast at descoring it wouldnt be smart to take the time to cap the high goal. However if they dont descore than I would cap the goal and take the extra points. But in a hypothetical scenario in which a team is intent on descoring and i need to occupy them for a brief time then i could possibly employ that strategy.
As far as capacity goes i think 4 will be the standard by Worlds. As already mentioned it allows you to fill a completed skyrise in 2 trips, and also gives you versatility on filling goals or capping them.
Precision is going to be major, what i think most people are overlooking is the time it takes to build skyrise. Right now it takes a whole match to partially build and fill a skyrise and in these cases very few other cubes are scored. If a robot can build the skyrise in 30 seconds or less and fill it in the next 45 seconds(max) that robot would then have the rest of the match to score on the other goals. I believe this is the ideal robot.
It might be a good idea for teams to put their skyrise building inside an automated routine, basically extending autonomous into teleop. There shouldn’t be any interruption thanks to the starting tiles being protected. I’ve seen that most teams spend too much time trying to position themselves for placing the skyrises, when if it was automated, they could seriously speed it up.
That’s exactly what my team is doing!!
It might also be a good idea to put an “interruption” button, so that if there’s a dire emergency (teammate incapacitated and opponents filling up the posts, robot tips over, robot suffers catastrophic failure) and then once the issue is taken care of, the skyrise builder function resumes from where it left off.
That’s a good idea, is your team doing something similar?
Automating the Skyrise building is something that can help save tons of time. The way I would do it is that the robot does one section, when you press a button it does the next, press it again and it does the next, and so on. Also so sort of way to override it and skip/redo a section. This way, if you accidentally drop a section, don’t put it in the autoloader in time, or need to do something else, there is some operator input.
The whole grabbing, driving, aligning, lifting, releasing, driving, lifting to autoloader, aligning, etc. can be done much more precisely with some good code and some sensors.
It’s on our to-do list. We’ve been working on CAD and logistics all through the summer, but our build is coming up soon. I’d say we definitely want to put a system like that in. It’ll certainly be interesting to program.