I had this concept for a Vex U “nuclear”/“instawin”/“lol who needs strategy” alliance at the beginning of the year, which was a bit too ambitious for our team to pull off in our first year. The premise is to have TWO high hanging robots, with balls, win autonomous, and stay up there while the opposition races to score as many points as you did just by sitting on the bar.
The 15" robot is much the same as a normal one, except for a few tweaks. The 24" bot, however, is capable of hoarding several large balls, high hanging, and swallowing the 15" robot to hang both at the same time. There’s a large “intake” area that has a vertical lift to force large balls up into a one-way vertical chute for hoarding. The small robot drives inside, contacts one of the alliance colour large balls, and when the large bot winches them up, it just has to poke the hanging bar with a zip tie.
Autonomous sees the large bot picking up two large balls, extending the chute to the height where it can hang, and the small bot drives in, hanging them both for 40+ point autonomous. In drivers, it can drop back down to do something, but I’d imagine there’s a serious risk to letting one robot alone on the field, and only 1 minute to score anything anyways. So, you’d have a 50+ point game routine.
Thoughts? Comments? I wanted to put the idea out there, and I have some concept sketches lying around somewhere too. Also, for people in the British Columbia area, there’s officially a local Vex U team, #PYRS, a joint team from UBC and SFU. Keep an eye out for us if you’re graduating.
After seeing some VEX U matches and looking at how this game will be played in the college division, it’s a cool idea, but with this game at least, you want to be able to score quickly. And unless you can hang with more than just 2 of your colored balls and 2 bots, you’ll be able to get outscored quickly.
We tossed this idea around during this season, but at the end of the day the maths just don’t add up. A guaranteed auton win + 2x high hang with ball is worth 50 points. This is equal to 10 stashed buckyballs, or about 2 full 24" goals. A team with 1 robot hanging with ball gets 20 points, which means they only have to score 30 remaining points, which with an easy 15 coming from the remaining large balls leaves a team only needing to score 3 buckyballs.
That being said, double hang is still very strong if teams cannot descore and you can stash buckyballs quickly at the beginning of the game.
Double hanging at any point in the match is useless, This is because 2 large balls can easily be capped with no defence and thus negating the 20 points from another high hanging robot
You might be able to cap one or both tubes, but you might also sacrifice removing the big balls scored in the high zone by holding them. Also, if the large balls you use to cap are already in the high zone, capping both tubes would only be worth ten points since you are essentially descoring five points and adding ten.
If you can stash two preloads by passing them over, that’s 60 points. It’s not impossible to beat, but it’s a lot harder because you only have a minute of drivers to catch up. Sure, it’s not the best idea, but at least it’s something different.
At the Michigan State Middle School Championship, one of my teams that had a high hanging robot, allied with another high hanging robot, (against my recommendation, but hey, I only recommend) and they performed a double high hang.
The ally hung first without a big ball, but was able to fold up on itself and our robot “high hung” below it with a big ball. The judges took several minutes conferring to figure out how to score it. They scored it as 30 points, but stated that only because each robot is supporting itself, did they allow both robots to count. They said if the lower robot was supporting the upper, the upper would not have counted so the scenario described (big robot swallowing little robot) would not have counted, at least as interpreted by our judges.
But, that doesn’t mean I think this idea would work. It’s certainly mechanically
Viable, but even assuming you knock down two big balls, score two buckies, win auto, and double hang, you’re looking at max of 70 points. 70 points can be beaten by a decent pair of robots. They could get 9 in the cylinders, or 45, plus one high hanging robot, plus one big ball on the ground and they already hit your score. They’ll be doing all of this in a skills run with two robots, which could easily be done.
I don’t support nuclear ideas unless they are “unbeatable.” However, this idea with some tweaking could be that.