Our team and 2 high school teams are scrimmaging with the Michigan State University college VEX team before Worlds. We’ve only got space for 1 field, and the college kids said they want to scrimmage on a college field, despite the fact that there will a middle school team and 2 high school teams there. This would obviously have negative repercussions on our ability to practice effectively at this scrimmage, so I’ve designed a compromise for us to use:
The objects on each side will be positioned and stacked as they would be on their respective normal fields. The stacks of 2 objects have a green 2 on them.
Each alliance will be run with a separate competition switch. This allows the college team to have 60 seconds of Autonomous and 80 of driver control, while the HS and MS teams will have 20 seconds of Autonomous and 2 minutes of driver control.
Blue will have to open their gate before the last 30 seconds, while red will not open their gate.
The center of the interaction zone is a compromise. The center 30" goal is from the HS challenge, while the pyramid of objects will be stacked like it is in the college challenge.
What do you guys think of this? Do you think it will be fair and give us all an equal opportunity to practice?
Looking at it from a college perspective, being that I’m on a college team, I would say that it really isn’t the best way to practice.
For one, there aren’t another set of 30” goals behind your own in isolation to practice scoring in. For another, your interaction zone robot would be able to go into the opponent’s isolation zone, which wouldn’t normally happen. Finally, it would be unfair for the last 40 seconds of your autonomous to be up against a robot that is being controlled by a driver.
I’m not trying to be critical of your idea, I’m just being honest. I will say though that I think your hybrid field set up is very interesting and well thought out. I do like it.
Perhaps a better compromise though would be for the first half of the day to be all teams competing on a MS/HS field with the appropriate rules, then the second half of the day you guys would set up the field for college play and all compete with college rules. I realize that’s more work, but it would technically be more realistic.
Ultimately though it’s up to you all, maybe your local college team is ok with the hybrid field. In that case I would say have at it.
I’m aware that the college team would have no opposite 30’s to score in, but they’ll still have the opposite 20" goal. Scoring in the opposite goals probably won’t be a problem, though. I’ve seen MSU’s iso bot and it’s not designed to do that anyway. Also, the lack of those 30" goals allows our robots to reach over to their 30" goals, which will give them practice at defending their goals from negators and opponent robots that are designed to score over those 30s.
The college interaction bot could indeed enter our iso zone, but they’ll probably be very busy passing objects to their iso bot, and in the last 30 seconds they’ll be busy with their doubler and negator. But if their interaction bot couldn’t enter the blue iso, they couldn’t use their negator very well without those opposite 30" goals. I suppose it makes up for the lack of those 30" goals and helps us practice defending against negators.
The autonomous part isn’t set in stone. What would you suggest we do for that part?
Usually, matches only last two hours at our scrimmages, and then they reset the field for skills. They probably wouldn’t want to rearrange the goals and stuff…
Our local college team probably won’t mind too many details. Worlds is their first competition, so their practice at this point is very basic.
Actually, I think we’re just gonna let them have their 30s so we have something to negate at the end. Remember, the reason we want a hybrid field is so we can practice high school game strategies, so we’ll be focused on the high school goals.
That would probably be a viable strategy for you at Worlds, although judging by a lot of their matches at worlds last year, you’d have the same end result if you just score 1 object. That 98-0 (MSU being the 0) match right before the Gateway unveil was really overkill…
I would say those are legitimate responses. In that case, your hybrid field should work just fine. The only thing I would do is make it so both teams have only a 20 second autonomous. That way you’re equally matched there and the college team gets more time to practice driving.
