Going to our first tournament of the season, we noticed all the robots in the finals match, and with the top five rankings in skills, were flip out reverse stackers. My main question was would a wall bot do well in this challenge? The simple answer is yes, in some situations, like one where you are pared with a flip out reverse stacker. But, a wall but is also really bad and skills, and it would be awful if it was paired with a defensive bot like itself. So, to sum it up, is there a way to combine a flip out reverse stacker with a wall bot?
I was thinking:
4 motor drive
1 motor wall
2 motor intake
1 motor tilter
That might work, but it would decrease your skills capabilities by increasing the time it would take to score cubes in a tower. I think that @dchoi77 attempted this.
I know our team toyed around the idea of a defensive robot capable of normal scoring. This robot would have had a powerful 6m drive in exchange for no arm dedicated for tower scoring. We would probably be building it right now if not for noticing how fast stacks were going up even though it was only mid way through the season. In this game stacking can be finished within 30s of driver control, so assuming you have a defensive robot there isn’t much room to be blocking your opponents from the key scoring aspect of the game.
In a game like ITZ a primarily defensive robot could do very well. In fact one did, 62A was an 8m drive robot with just a small 4 bar and chain bar to make it capable of scoring. 62A even made it to the Round Robin at worlds, but this game is different. In ITZ you were constantly scoring and there was always more on the field to score, but in this game stacking can be finished quite quick leaving barely any room for a defensive robot to effectively play worthwhile defense.
You could do one stack during autonomous and then use the wall bot the rest of the game.
Think about it, if you stack 7 cubes during auton, then block the other team from scoring the rest of the game, you will have almost even scores. Then, your alliance partner would be able to score any additional needed points that you would need to win the match.
That is exactly what we thought as far as auton, but having to play defense on 2 teams for a whole 1:30 is way to much time to be having to prevent the opponents from stacking
I can see that it would be really hard to prevent opinions from stacking for a whole minute 30, but in that time, if your wall bot was really effective your alliance partner could score more than the other two teams combined could score if you were blocking them hard.
I like how you’re thinking on that. The main problem though, is that with that system you need to be better than your opponent by a long shot at scoring. Simply put the strategy would only work if you had the best robot in the entire tournament And based off where we are right now, we probably will not be able to get a robot working as well as some of the other ones in the state. Also another advantage of having that extra back up wall, is that it does not depend on the drivers practice. Practice is also a big issue because we are already not able to meet very often throughout the week because of various reasons.
One of my teams has a wallbot design and they are hoping to block both goals. They have a large wallbot that extends across the outer protected zone and wedges itself in the wall. BUT at the start of auton they have a second base fall off the main base that is connected with a really long cord (and the wires are very protected). The big wallbot protects the big score zone and the one that falls off the main base goes over and protects the small zone.
At our first tournament they had problems with port burnout with the long cords. They also struggled to deploy their wall bot when opponents were stayed in their own protected zone. I think they have a lot of the issues solved and I am hoping that it is a semi-effective anti-meta at our next tournament. Someone has to figure out a way to counter all these tray bots!
One of their other thoughts is to use the main base to guard the big zone and then you have 4 motors on the second base to do something offensive.