As you all know, there have been a plethora of different robot designs implemented into this year’s game, Tipping Point.
But, over the tournaments that I’ve participated in, the matches I’ve seen, and the designs from the nation, I noticed some similarities.
Most of them have a 6m drive, the ability to posses at least 2 mobile goals, if not more, and good parking capabilities.
I’m sure that you all have probably encountered some speculations of robot designs that seem to be the ideal design for this game, and these similarities add on to my theory that there will most likely be a meta design that several teams will use for their robots.
Right now, I think that the typical meta design is a 6 motor drive, a 1 motor lift with a pneumatic clamp on it, a back pneumatic grabber/lift/clamp, and alliance goal ring conveyor.
or you could have a geared down 4-motor drive, 1 motor goal lift, 1 motor second goal carrier, and a 1-2 motor ring scorer, and maybe a 1 cylinder third goal hook. we can climb the platform with two goals and score rings well.
From what I’ve seen, I think that a robot with a 6m drive, a pneumatic lift, a ring scorer onto that pneumatic lift, and a four bar with a pneumatic clamp is quite a common design that I’ve seen the more competitive teams use. An example of this would be team 4478S, where they efficiently used this robot to win a tournament- I think.
I’m pretty confident that the winners of worlds will both have 6m drives. it’s just really easy to do everything else that you need to with only 2m and pneumatics, and the advantages 6m drive has this year are huge. I’m also confident that the winners will only have 2 goal capacity each, since you only need a combined 4 goal capacity between you and your partner to get the goal majority, and the chances of splitting the goals 5-2 are pretty much nothing in the very top matches.
But the meta isn’t necessarily the robots that win worlds, it’s the most common design that most competent teams are going to. And right now that looks to be 6m drive, 1m lift, 1m ring conveyor, and pneumatic goal holding mechs on both sides of the bot to hold 2 goals. But the actual specifics of how these mechanisms work vary wildly from robot to robot, which is pretty cool. And there are still so many good robots that don’t follow this overall layout that I think it’s hard to say that it’s the meta, since there are plenty of other designs that are proving to be competitively viable, unlike most games where there’s really only one competitive type of robot.
I agree that we’ll probably see 6m drives, likely 2 goal capacity, and a ring system, however I do think that eventually teams will start looking at scoring on the lower neutral posts as opposed to just alliance posts, as neutral goals offer another 24 pts, and if teams are down, those 24 pts could offer the difference, especially if the alliance goals aren’t enough to secure the win
agreed. maybe it’s just where I come from, or the fact that I’m in middle school, but I’ve seen both of those types distributed equally in the tournaments I go to. It could go either way.
From what I see from this pole, not many people seem to think that a pure parking robot is optimal, but being able to both park AND stack seems to be the optimal way to score points.
I would presume that’s because parking is useful when you are on the losing side of a 3-4 mobile goal match. If one of your robots can do a few alliance rings and you can park, you at least have a chance at winning. It’s also useful in skills to get that easy (in comparison) 30 points.
