Has anyone seen a good liftbot in tournament yet? Because like every experienced team I know of (including me) and their grandma is making a snailbot for change up and I’m thinking that the liftbot design might be slept on.
Several months ago, what makes the snailbot design appealing to me among other things is the prospect of automated sorting with the inclusion of a pooper but after watching a few tournaments, not every team has one and the teams who have one use it fairly often but not necessarily as often as I would have imagined. A lot of the change up so far based on the tournaments I’ve watched has been a lot of 1 or 2 balls in goals and carrying one or 2 balls in the robot and quickly switching it out. I don’t really ever see really 3 balls in goals that often.
There is also the topic of small intakes vs big intakes. while I’m not keeping count, it seems to me that it’s about a 50/50 split between these styles of intakes among snail bots. Just small intakes existing proves that you can do a pretty good job at this game without flipout/deploy intakes. My thinking is that big intakes are worth it so that you field better and so you can actively descore middle goal. but if poking out middle goal is fine enough, then big intakes are devalued.
If that’s all a robot needs to do, then a liftbot is pretty optimized to do that while at the same time being significantly easier to make than a liftbot (which is already fairly easy). One nice thing about liftbot design is consistency on placing balls since you basically touch the ball the entire time until it drops into the goal giving you a ton of control of the ball. Also because of this it makes scoring in middle goal as consistent or maybe more consistent than a backboarded snail. Also poking out the middle goals, though very unoptimized isn’t that bad since its usually just easier to poke the middle goal than aligning with it especially when going fast.
As for the main downside of liftbot, it is horrendous at draining goals empty since it can only descore one ball at a time. But like that might not be that bad cause 1 and 2 ball goals and lift bot is pretty optimized for 3 ball goals assuming your going for rows etc. There is also the time it takes to raise the lift which I also think isn’t that bad since 3 ball capacity lift bot is probably plenty and is pretty light, so it would be a good idea to speed up the lift. Also making the lift raise a tad higher would be better. This is just general ideation to improve 46535K’s design which is already pretty good just hasn’t yet had the tlc that snailbot design has had.
After driving around basically all major snailbot variants, I’m reconsidering liftbot. But at the end of the day I’m going to make a snailbot, but since basically all experienced teams are making snailbots, there is the possibility for unforeseen strats and tech on liftbots. Which makes me wonder if you guys haven seen any good ones in tournament? Also if this design is as bad as you guys originally thought based on how the game is being played at the moment.
disambiguation:
liftbot - 46535K early season
snailbot - 210Y early season
pooper snailbot (ejector roller) - 99999V
small intakes snailbot (non flip out intakes) - 80708X
big intakes snailbot (flip out intakes) - 99999V
small intake liftbot - 46535K early season
big intake liftbot - NXS
