Over the years, there are ideas that were highly popular that year, and then were incorporated into the “canon” of well-used techniques in subsequent years. Some examples:
2007 Quad Quandary - Center needle intake
2008 Elevation - Dual tank-tread belt conveyors
2009 Clean Sweep - X - Holonomic Drives
2010 Round-up - PID control
2011 Gateway - 6-bar lifts, and sideways roller intake w/flaps (aka New Zealand intake)
2012 Mecanum drives, 8/10-bar lifts
Often a technique made its appearance the previous year, then became wildly popular the next.
Are there any that you would add to the list? In particular, what would you say are this year’s trending themes?
I think Round Up was when 4 and 6 bars actually started getting popular too - if I remember correctly, the 6 bar was popularized by AURA’s usage of it in Round Up.
I think it depends a lot on the similarity of games between the two seasons. Such as the side intakes which have already been seen a lot this season, taken from Gateway and the Top roller/tank tread intake seen in Sack Attack first being used in Clean Sweep. I think it depends a lot more on a design to fit the needs of the game.
On the contrary to that is of course the introduction of x-bar lifts and PID programming which have become more generic ideas that can be used every season.
I disagree with your examples of mecanums for Sack Attack, but that might just be because I live in a bottom corner of the globe and don’t get to see a large number of teams.
There’s some ambiguity of when a design goes from being “present” to “popular”. Definitely AURA’s 6-bar lifts had been used the previous year. But I recall looking at video feed of the Gateway Championships, and after watching 10 matches (40 robots) asking myself, “Was there even 1 robot that WASN’T a 6-bar lift?”
My aim for this post was primarily to hear more “widely used ideas.” They can be “sub-themes” (for example, mecanum drives – I saw about 20% of local teams use them last year, not as widely-used as 6-bars, but still significant). But I’m not so much interested in exactly when or exactly how popular the ideas were – simply that they stood out.
More ideas, more variety, please!
And I’m especially interested in this year’s popular trends, even if they’re not new ones. BTW, our team is non-competing, so I’m not trying to “steal” ideas.
I find it interesting that scissor lifts are getting more popular this year.
I guess a natural change is that more teams are using high tension chain and high tension gears while the amount of teams with pneumatics are slowly increasing.
Another trend I’m seeing is that competitive teams are strafing away from full omniwheels with a combination of High traction and omni’s
Also, many teams aren’t using high speed ratios, rather, they’re sticking to internal gearing with 1 to 1.6 speed
Each trend has their own strength and weakness. But I only see growing competitiveness in the future, especially in college.
I would say that I have seen a greater prevalence of holonomic drives this year than most other years. Also many more teams are using elevator lifts than ever before.
