I am curious as to how many balls a team can score in one match CONSISTENTLY,and how many you can score at one time. Thanks in advanced for all responses:D
I believe any decent team can score ALL the balls on the field in one match. Of course their robots may not =P
i agree, I think FVC participants of half pipe hustle and hangin around have pretty much mastered the whole ball thing. The worst part is you really dont have any thing you have to build around (weight of balls). I believe it would be pretty simple to build a bot to score most if not all the balls yourself.
Great…
Tell me when your team picks up ALL the balls in 2 minutes + autonomous. With all the chaos on the field it is very difficult to get all the balls in the goal with one robot or even a team. Two minutes is not enought time to accomplish this.
Technic-R-C
No one got the joke? Your team = your team members.
ahh nver mind
But realistically it shouldn’t be too difficult to score a large portion of the balls consistantly if you take the basic tread pickup and store about 12 balls a run.
The run would most likely be 15 seconds and so the maximum number of balls you would pick up would be 48 balls, if you are lucky. My robot picks up more than 20 balls at a time, but it takes a while to collect them and score them.
Technic-R-C
I was actually just looking at some FVC footage from the world championship and I still think its possible to do, but then again Im not sure how many balls are on the field 
the biggest challeng with the balls with FVC last year was the weight of the balls and the size (takes up more space to store them). Both of these factors are almost non existant in the bridge battle game. Therefore I think it would be not easy but very well possible. As far as your robot (absolutely no disrespect intended) if you can hold 20 balls but it takes a while to pick them up then its almost pointless. Mr. Robot 2.0 scored 5 balls at a time last year and did extremely well because they could do it very fast.
edit: You know wat i take that back, 20 balls seems like it will get you a win
Well the challenging part about Bridge Battle is that the balls are pushed up against the walls of the playing field. It doesn’t sound difficult to just push the balls from the wall and into the middle of the field, but I have seen so many robots that have had trouble getting the balls from the wall and onto their robot.
None taken:)
Sorry… I didn’t clarify well enough
The time it takes for my robot to pick up the balls and score them is probably in the range of 20-35 seconds. So in a match, I can get 3-4 loads of <=20 balls into the goals. During the regional however, I was averaging about 14 balls per load, which was still good enough to advance my robot far into the competition and to the world championship.
However, when designing the robot, it was very difficult to pick a design that would score fast, pick up balls, AND drive under the bridge (not a lot of space, but just enough). Therefore I had to sacrifice some precious seconds when scoring and picking up the balls. I also had to gear my robot for higher torque, because it weighed around 20lbs., and therefore lost some more precious seconds. However, in my opinion I’d rather sacrifice speed for higher scoring robot any day. It all depends on the competition.
Technic-R-C
I don’t think that thread pick up and release will cut it for this competition. About 1 in 2 robots had the thread pick up device on their robot but only 1-2 teams that qualified at the IRE regional had used the tank threads as a secondary device, not their main loader and releaser. I am not saying that it is a bad idea, but over the years it has been over used repeatedly. Use a little innovation… you never know what you might come up with.
Technic-R-C
Hey, SHIRT what’s up with the competition? I heard it may be canceled? Let me know.
Our robot can pic up all the balls off of the walls. We can hold roughly 21 balls and score them all. We can complete the entire process in roughly 20-30 seconds, and then repeat.
If I were actually doing the competition, I’d probably still use something similar to occam’s pickup, just because it seems to be the most consistent.
I’m guessing your using something similar to checkmate’s 06/07 pickup, which is good but can sometimes be slow.
You also have to keep in mind, the most important part of the robot is not the manupulator, but actually the drive base. Yeah that’s right, if you have a bad drive base, it doesn’t matter how good the actual manipulator is.
As of now we are trying to postpone the comp rather than canceling it. If I understand correctly many of the teams are busy with other things now (FLL, FRC, orther FTC tournaments). Since we are trying to give everyone a chance to participate we will try to find a time thats just not as busy.
I agree, your drive train makes or breaks you in the competition, there is no effective way to score if you cant get around.
Our robot happened to be similar to checkmate’s robot, with the exception that our was much bigger and the basket lift was slower. I believe that it was a good design though. Getting balls, It was the best type of robot in the comp. Scoreing balls, it was top three at least. think its a great design.
It is possible to innovate with the tank treads. We try to do something different with every bot for each competition.
It does make or break your bot. We designed a pretty good drive base last year and have used it on every bot for every competition. We switched something around this time though, we’ll have to see how it goes.
So, I can be assured the the competition, if it takes place, will occur on a date later than March 22, but definetly not on March 22.
My robot can pick up 1,000,000,000,000 tennis balls, i know it seems like a lot but its really not.
O i forgot there was a decimal point before the 1 trillion, .1trillion thats 1/10 of a tennis ball.
So you see our robot picks up .1,000,000,000,000 tennis balls with ease.
Ill get our mentor to post just to make sure.
lol actually that’s pretty good if you can build a gripper that can pick up that small of a object with precision
Ok to get this thread back on track there are 61 balls on the field, each alliance starts with 8. 3 of those 61 balls are worth 5 times the others ones. So the chances of every ball being scored are very low, some will get into corners some will get stuck in or under robots. So if you take out 4 balls that leaves you with 57 balls to score. Take out the 3 bonus balls and thats 54. So in order to win on normal balls alone your alliance needs to score at least 27 balls.
Another thing to remember is that the balls are worth more in auto mode, significantly more. Also those bonus balls are worth 5 regular balls, if you get all 3 bonus balls that is the equivalent of getting 15 balls.
Sounds like a winning robot would be one that is fast, consistent at picking up balls, has a great auto mode, and can get balls from anywhere.