This year’s East Oahu Regional is being webcast.
http://www.livestream.com/iobotics
You can also track match scores at vexscores.com !!
Aw shucks, saw this happening, but didn’t know what site to link others to. Maybe next year. Tried to look in email and on robotevents for a link. Why didn’t I think to look here?
BTW, was thinking next year perhaps - 2012 ‘Iolani Veterans’ Day Tournament…?
Congratulations on your performance today. You earned your well deserved spot to Anaheim!
Oh, and good selection with the Excellence as well. They were (once again) the most deserving of the distinction despite no additional World slot.
Who won the Excellence Award? Sorry, I left once finals started 
Just want to thank Kalani and Highlands for being great alliance partners, and congrats to all the teams. I thought most of the top ranked teams and elimination round teams had a combination of well-performing and interesting robots.
Also I guess the other awards while I’m here…
**Tournament Champs: **1973D (Mililani HS), 2348B (Iolani School), & 1973E (Mililani HS)
Robot Skills: 4109 (808 Robotics) & 3008A (Kalani HS) - 25
Programming Skills: 4109 (808 Robotics) - 19
Build: 3008A (Kalani HS)
Innovate: 2443Z (Maui HS)
Energy: 2932 (Mid-Pac)
Sorry if I missed any.
Thank you very much for the compliments–we hope that everyone who attended enjoyed the tournament. 4109 was definitely deserving (after winning both of the skills challenges, they had a pretty big advantage!). That’s a good suggestion regarding the name; we’ll have to consider that one.
For the record, the winning alliance was three of the New Zealand design (six-bar with side roller intake). After seeing it in action, our team thought of a bunch of ways to make meaningful improvements before Pan Pacific… we’ll see you all there in early December. The 2438 Reveal thread will have a new update soon.
Tournament Finalists: 3590A, 4901, 3925K
Excellence: 4109
Judges’ Award: 3925K
Apologies if I forgot any awards; please feel free to post more below. Thanks to all the teams who participated, we’ll see you at the next one!
That was a fun tournament Iolani, the quality of the robots was much greater this year, the competition fierce. Congratulations on tournament champs and your gracious professionalism!
A bit curious to see what designs go to Pan though. Seeing just iterations of the New Zealand teams was a bit disappointing.
Exciting tournament though! See you folks at Pan!
You know, it’s funny, because everyone calls it the “New Zealand” design when it’s really just the 24 design with the intake turned sideways. :V It works well mostly because it’s simple and effective.
(If you want to hear the story, three weeks before the competition, we hit a wall with the other design we were working on. We had no time left to come up with a creative idea, so we executed something we had seen be effective. It’s a shame that that’s the way it panned out, because I would’ve liked to see the other one working and I feel that creativity is great, but sometimes you have to be derivative in order to actually have a working robot. Trust me, there will be changes at PanPac.)
I’m getting worried about this game. The design popularized by the World Cup videos is light, fast, can execute almost all possible game functions, and is easy to build. I’d be unsurprised to see a flood of them at Worlds, which is an issue because of the Elevation problem. When everyone has the same robot, winners are determined by driver skill and the way the objects bounce. When that happens, most teams are done for (regardless of who they are), because statistically speaking you’re going to get unlucky eventually.
It seems like we’ve found “the design” and now the search is on for “the ace in the hole”…
The level of robot ability has pretty much peaked already because there are designs out there that are about optimized for efficiency. The only difference is that this year it happened faster. From here, there’s only a few things to do.
You could design a very creative robot to play an element of the game that nobody has considered yet (That’s what we’re doing right now). You could just build your robot better than other people’s by having a better structure, lighter, stronger, etc. Add “twiddly things” that improve the efficiency of your bot or help score an extra point in autonomous (Clean sweep goal post ears, Round Up prescore tubes)
Now, if everybody ends up with the same design anyways, it becomes a matter of driver skill, programming and strategy. Driving skill is self-explanatory, and good programming can help that by streamlining the process. Also, an awesome autonomous can give a reeeaaaally important head start in the game. When it comes to luck, if it just seems you lost for inexplicable reasons, it’s usually that the other team accidentally or purposefully used strategy on you. Some luck is when the doubler falls off the goal, but it’s strategy when the bots end up in an advantageous position. The idea is to know what that position is, and how to put your teams into it.
Any team that thinks that we’ve already peaked will be in for a shock by the time Worlds comes around.
I can understand that people have to call the rough design SOMETHING, but I don’t really like the “New Zealand” design, mainly because we actually have quite a lot of different robot designs. If you get to look closely at all the kind of similar six-bar side-roller intake robots, they’re actually all built slightly differently which actually does make an impact on how they work on the field. And on top of that we have all the non-six-bar, non-side-roller robots. I also find it interesting that the robot that all these teams have “copied” isn’t even the best design that was at World Cup.
Anyway, saying that the “New Zealand” design is just 24C’s design with the intake turned sideways is effectively the same as saying that 24C’s design is the same as 1103’s Round Up robot but with a different drivetrain, lift system, intake, driver, autonomous sequence, and strategy. No two robots are the same, regardless of how similar they look.
Yeah, I agree that peak performance has not been hit yet.
The results of your elimination rounds seem to disagree with your argument; was there a freak elimination or something? I went and rewatched the elimination matches and didn’t see anything better than the 720 design…
Um, no, those are completely different. When we say that a robot “is the New Zealand design”, we’re using an analogy to denote that a robot performs similarly to another robot that a lot of people have seen. It makes descriptions of robots a lot more concise and a lot less confusing. If you asked someone to describe a video game to you, would you rather they say “it’s like video game X” or would you like them to run through every single feature?
If you look at my post, you’ll notice that I didn’t say your robot is the exact same thing as 24’s robot with the intake turned sideways. I said that the designs are very similar. When we refer to “robot designs”, we’re using a shorthand that makes a generalization. We’re not necessarily being precise.
My point, which used generalizations, was the following:
The “New Zealand” Design:
Six-bar linkage
Ramp on six-bar linkage with storage capacity for objects
Side-roller intake
The “24” Design:
Six-bar linkage
Ramp on six-bar linkage with storing capacity for objects
Top-roller intake
And hence my argument - those of us who’ve actually seen 720p’s robot properly can tell you that it works very differently to 24C’s robot. ThirteenTwo says that 720p was the best robot that he saw, and while ‘best’ is up for debate, it doesn’t use a six-bar so if you’ve built a six-bar like 24C, you’re not using the ‘best’ design from world cup. Essentially my point here is 720p is very VERY different to 24C.
As I said, I can understand why people want to call it the “New Zealand” design just so that they have something to refer to when they are talking about the design that you’re talking about, but I wanted to point out that there are a LOT of variations and it’s not really a “New Zealand” design any more than there is a “United States” design - all of the robots are simply different. If you want to use “New Zealand” design to mean:
“Six-bar linkage
Ramp on six-bar linkage with storage capacity for objects
Side-roller intake”
then that’s fine, but I can tell you that there are a lot more New Zealand robots that don’t use use these features than those that do.
And even if it was the main New Zealand robot design, it certainly won’t be for much longer.
As was said above, if you want to call 720 the “New Zealand” design, then that’s not what it was like also I personally think drive has a lot to do with it too, and motor placement, torque/speed on different aspects of the robot, speed, etc. The motor placements for the two robots was really very different.
Also, I think if you have side-suckers or top-suckers you kind of have to have a ramp to store objects so I’d group that under the intake category in your comparison… So they don’t have the same drive, don’t have the same lift, don’t have the same intake… I suppose the only real similarity is that they have a ramp, as you said… But I suppose I see what you mean about the same function/performance: they both have to do the same motions to score/pick up, etc. and would look similar in terms of operation (but not in terms of physical appearance :p)
Sure, that’s a good method for someone who maybe has minimal knowledge on the subject, and if X is well known despite that, but for all of us here who know the basics about robots anyway I think it’s a whole lot more effective to just go “side suckers, 6-bar, 4WD” for example, than to say it’s like “the X design” when X is a country containing MANY robots (not just a single robot) and when the two are really quite different…
By the way, I’m not trying to be harsh or anything, just saying my opinion 
OK, yeah, “the New Zealand design” is a pretty silly categorization for a robot and might better be called something else, but that’s come into the vernacular (at least here in Hawaii). From where I’m standing, it’s just like the people who got upset last year over the use of the pseudo-word “descore” or the people who insist on calling a certain part “rubber links” instead of “shock mounts”. It’s fruitless to try to challenge an established vernacular.
As I explained, very clearly I think, the term does not refer to any particular robot. It refers to a general idea. My list reflected the set of ideas that teams here in Hawai`i are calling “the New Zealand design”, not 720’s robot. Your argument based on the drive train and lift differences is based on an assumption that I was specifically referring to a single robot, which I was not.
Seems like robots are mainly categorized according to their intake mechanisms more than anything else. The intake mechanism dictates the general playstyle of the robot no matter how different the lift and chassis is and seems like an effective and quick way to categorize teams during, say, scouting.
Aside from that, I agree that it is the small details and differences in each of the subsystems of the robot that separate the good robots from the great robots.
Phrases used to describe a type of robot intake, lift, drive, or overall effectiveness in my opinion doesnt even matter. It’s up to the person to decide what they want to call a certain design. Unless it’s an insult there’s absolutely nothing wrong with generalizing robots based on their intakes and nationality as long as theres no hard feelings, which in robotics, shouldn’t be the case. What you call a type of robot is not going to decide the future or your robot, or theirs, so there really shouldn’t be any disagreement in terms of silly names.
In terms of actual competition. Personally, i think that there is a HUGE variety of options for this years game, baskets with intakes on the bottom, ramps with side or top intakes, claws, conveyors, even hooks. It all depends on the strategy and the efficiency of the design that will determine the winner of the competition. That being said, usually luck is a huge factor, but what we like to do is to incorporate room for error into our design. For instance, speed, which is gained by having a smaller manipulator, will make up for the error that can be caused with a slow basket in the instance that a piece is being picked up and is dropped, as a fast claw will be able to retrieve that piece much faster.
Even this years game, as always, is very much a psychological one. Although scoring one piece in each goal early one may seem feasible to overcome, when you’re in a match, driving, seeing that the opponent has scored first in a goal is really going to drive you away from scoring in that goal, although it’s not always the right thing to do. Scoring faster may be the key to winning instead of scoring more.
I’m interested to see What Pan Pacific will entail. There are so many designs and everyone has a different interpretation of each design. good luck everyone. Happy build season until then.