It seems that in recent games, the higher level teams are using 6 motor drive bases compared to 4 motor drive bases. I’d like to hear some opinions on if you think that this is becuase:
A. Recent Regulations (pneumatics without motor penalty)
B. Recent Games Promote Faster/More Powerful Drive Bases
C. Teams Simply Getting Better at Robotics, Being More efficient with motors, allowing for more drive power.
Tipping point promoted 6 motor drives with all the fighting over mobile goals, and this years game (spin up) seems to also promote 6 motor drive with securing rings and rollers quickly.
I don’t think Spin Up will require a 6m drive base to be competitive. Something to remember is that 6m bases were required this year not only to be fast but to control mogos which are quite heavy. Looking back just one year at CU, some of the best teams had light, low torque high speed chassis
I personally think that robots this year will be light enough to pull off ~4.5 f/s with a 4m base. I am saying this from my own experience after using a 4m base this year before obtaining pneumatics (the base didn’t overheat until after we attempted to climb/push around more than one goal).
I agree that 6m drive is not going to be necessary to win, but I’m also not sure if those 2 motors will have anywhere better to be than the drive. We might see 6m sticking around, but with even faster and more insane ratios.
I really hope and think the meta will be an x-drive. At least for skills where moving around and keeping your shooting mechanism aimed at the goal is really important.
I also want a turrent like thing up top that can spin 360 degrees but it seems somewhat unrealistic.
Back to drives though, since there won’t be any pulling, or driving onto platforms, for early season I believe a 4m x-drive might be the right call. Later in the season when everyone is stupidly efficient at scoring all the disks, I think a 6m drive may be used to push opponents away from rollers and push people off the “prime land” for expanding to touch the most tiles.
I feel like turret meta would be much easier for VEXU than VRC (anyone remember VCAT in TP?), but there will definitely be some HS teams (and maybe even some MS teams) with one. As far as X-drives go the argument could be made for them (perhaps an asterisk drive if teams still want a 6 motor drivetrain), especially now since V5 motors are much more powerful than V4 (one of the reasons why cyber brains was the only arguably good X-drive in NBN at worlds).
I intend to be on of those HS teams. It seems that with a good tracking algorithm and a good loading/firing system, this could be over powered. Cycle times will once again be important. I already have some ideas for custom bearings/turntables because vex doesn’t make once with a 5" inner diameter unfortunately.
Then I would highly watching this video. Team Orbit had a limelight powered auto aiming turret with shooting-on-the-move capabilities. Although their coding is pretty complex, I think some of it could transfer over to VRC.
Thanks for the reference. The use of dual imus, a vision sensor, some good tracking wheels with odom, could probably make a really good tracking system.
My job is to design the system that moves, I’m not a programmer so I even though I say it’s doable I have no idea. But my team’s programmers are pretty darn smart so I have no doubt they could whip something up.
Although I could see bots with only two non-drive motors, I would suspect that many teams that use a flywheel (arguably the best way to shoot a frisbee) will want to use a separate motor for their intake and flywheel which could easily take up two to three motors. Extra motors from the chassis could also be used for an ambitious turret design as well as a vertical aiming system.
I personally predict the meta, at least until someone finds a simple way to make a turret, will just be a fairly simple flywheel bot with intuitive aim assit systems. It must be kept in mind that no matter how good your bot is at cycling shots and getting to frisbees, if you are unable to make nearly every shot from everywhere on the field, you will be unable to compete at the highest level.
I don’t see why the logic for the laster season doesn’t apply to the early season. If most ppl can’t reliably score on the high goals then its kinda a push bot game. So the advantage of pushing around everyone and pushing discs could be really good.
My thinking was getting efficient enough to actually have time to focus on pushing people around takes time. I suppose I could be wrong but it’s also kinda an opinion, I hate the idea of just pushing people around all match like in TiP. It was designed to be a physical game but it got out of hand.
At first glance I feel like four motors is sufficient. The pancake, if you will, are as big as tower takeover cubes which yes there were a lot but you needed to not be too fast and miss all the cubes. I think maybe four motors geared up yes, but not really feeling the six motor drive. Plus my teams 85 inches/second speed at worlds was ridiculously fast, we never lost an auton. I don’t see that this year. If anything I’d hope four motors and not too fast so you can line up with the goals.