This past weekend our team, 5776, competed at the Bellarmine Bay Area VEX Robotics Tournament and ended up snagging 1st and 5th on the Robot Skills and Programming Skills rankings with scores of 306 and 256 respectively.
We thought sharing the strategy we used to achieve our high scores would help teams with shorter range and/or firing rates to increase their potential for high scores in skills. Instead of shooting corner to corner, we decided to shoot straight from the red starting tiles to the blue net and from the blue starting tiles to the red net.
To give you a better idea, here’s a video of our Programming Skills run.
It makes it a whole lot easier to aim, as the smaller distance to the nets allows for a larger margin of error in programming and driving. In addition to decreasing distance, it also allows flywheels (if you are using them) to shoot with a smaller refractory period as less power is being used to shoot balls.
We thought this was a pretty big deal and we’re happy with how much it has helped our scores with minimal practice so we can’t wait to see what the community can do with this strategy in the future.
I realised that the balls rubs against the side of the red net when you were shooting from the blue tile… did that affect your shots? I saw some balls bouncing off the sides of the red net which gives very little space for left-right error.
But apart from that I believe this method will work quite well actually… I’ll be trying this method out tomorrow and compare that to shooting across the field
Left-right error is not that much different - we just turned a bit too much before we started shooting from the blue tile. It’s simply a matter of tuning it correctly.
I’m sure that we will begin to see skill scores go up even higher as we begin to see more teams try this approach. I will try this at our next competition and hope we win programming and/or driver skills. Team Legend 5601 is very competitive with his single wheel launcher’s fire rate, so I know it’ll be a close one.
This is a brilliant idea, but this will only work efficiently for flywheels and puncher, as it would be to difficult to adjust on a catapult. Nonetheless, a great idea.
I was wondering when a video of this skill run strategy would be shown out there. Our D team used this strategy for it’s only skill run of the year so far. If tuned right for most non tension shooters it should be more effective in accuracy. We scored above our entire match average when we did it this way and that was only with a single side of preloads and no field balls or partner. The only difference between yours and ours is that we shoot from the other starting square. Awesome robot, strategy, and programming to get it that quick and accurate!
November 26.