I hope your right, but I don’t see how this is physically possible. It seems this year the limitation is due to humans. How fast can a human physically put balls into the robot, 60+ times on two sides of the field. Feels like a human coordination test more than a robot skills test.
Edit: I do think some teams will launch all balls and have time to get some shots off from the field. But I think it will be a far cry from half of the time. Also, this will be a VERY small percentage of teams. The typical team will only have time to try to launch driver control loads.
I like the current format, because I think it’s cool to see robots with extremely high firing rates, which is encouraged by the current skills format. I think Jack is right about half the time being spent on the field by the end of the season. I shot all 64 preloads in 45 seconds in a skills run yesterday, and that includes the time spent driving across the field to the other starting tiles and a lot of time spent aiming. It wasn’t accurate, but that’s why this game is cool, it’s hard to be both fast and accurate.
Two people loading from a box can load at 3+ balls per second with a little bit of practice. I don’t think that will be the rate limiting factor, as long as teams have a box to load from.
My opinion, I view manual loading of scoring objects into a robot no differently from manual re-positioning of a robot, be it in skills or in matches. I really, really dislike both equally. Both result in making the task easier / faster / less challenging / less robotics oriented than it would otherwise have been. I hope that eventually, in future games, manual loading will be phased out as re-positioning currently has been.
In previous games, there have only been a few manual loads. This year there really are a lot, especially in skills. The match loads in Skyrise were more appealing to me, as the skyrise pieces were not allowed to be directly loaded onto the robots, so a mechanism was required for the robot to pick them up. Better still, would have been a rack that held all 7 pieces being set up before the match started.
Add to this, I personally find it a bit boring seeing the robot sitting in one position carrying out a routine under rules that protect this routine from any intervention by the other alliance. This was the case last year for skyrise building and again the case this year for manual loads being shot at the high goal. This is because I enjoy watching dynamic interaction and alliances being rewarded for teamwork and altering strategy on the fly, in response to what the other alliance is doing. The strategies this year are very limited and seem to be predictable, I think not helped by the fact there is no de-scoring?
I do like the fact we have a shooting game, which is a good engineering challenge. I just think that some of the rules have resulted in it being less of a spectacle and less of a challenge than it might otherwise have been.
I have to agree with Paul.
Re-positioning skills has been replaced with loading skills after a brief interlude during the Skyrise season. Hopefully next season will see a return to robot and programming skills.
In a regular match, your robot has to fit within an 18x18x18 “cube”. Can this “cube” be rotated to fit your needs? For example (and why this post is relevant) one of my crazier ideas is having a wall that is as high as possible that blocks the shots of the enemy alliances driverloads by standing outside of the colored square and making a wall between the launching robot and the goal. First of all do you think this is a good strategy? And secondly can my wall be up to ~25.4 sqrt(2*18^2) inches high?
That is probably a legal strategy so long as you start without the box rotated, and make sure even once the box is rotated that you stay within it. That would be a very interesting strategy.
Every configuration must not exceed 18 inches above the flat surface that the robot rests upon. I believe you are miss reading karthik’s post. The box follows the robot up a ramp because the plane the robot is on is angled not because the robot can be turned to be inside of the box.
This is just for height. For length and width the direction of the square size restrictions are up to your discretion. Team BNS had a robot that had to be sized diagonally because one length was 1.3 times the size limit but under 1.41 (rad 2).
I’m not quite convinced. Karthik didn’t seem to say that the configuration showed in the diagrams on the linked question thread would be illegal, and he didn’t say anything about the 18" height limit being measured from the flat surface the robot rests on.
If that thread is accurate (and I would be blown away if it wasn’t) then the wall is definitely legal. So what do you think of the strategy (assuming that the wall can be up to ~25.4 inches)?
There are two main strategies for shooting at the net. You can either “lob” the ball up into the air so that it lands in the net, or you can shoot more directly at the net and have it hit the back of the net. The latter strategy will use a lower angle, and a wall-bot like the one we are talking about might be able to block the other robot’s shots.
However, this doesn’t account for robots that fire at a higher angle. Also, the wall wouldn’t be able to be quite up to 25.4" because you would need some sort of base to support the wall, which would have some width, meaning the bottom of the box would have to be slightly below the floor in order to accommodate the base.
With all of these things considered, there’s still the question of whether or not blocking your opponent’s shots would even be beneficial to the match. This would only help you if you are sure your alliance partner is better than the alliance partner of the robot you are blocking.
All in all, this would be interesting to see, but I don’t think it would be a very effective strategy overall.
According to Average score/ robot - VRC > Nothing But Net (15/16) - VEX Forum
the average base shooter should be able to shoot 150 pts and the average in field robot around 50 especially if there is a wall trying to block the in field robot
If your partner is a base shooter and you can block their base shooter’s balls, 50*2<150 and the wall wins. Any problems with my logic?
That may work well if your partner is a good base shooter, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll always get such a good alliance partner, or that you’ll always be able to block the opposing base shooter. IMO, it might be an effective strategy in some circumstances, but I’d be much more comfortable with an offensive strategy, which is what the game was designed for.
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