I’ve gotta say that I see where you’re coming from, but at the same time I don’t entirely agree. While the challenge is relatively simple at its core, there are several other aspects of design and strategy that didn’t come up as much in the past few seasons, which I think will be more prevalent this season:
There are many different ways of doing the challenge (mechanisms for driving, scoring, descoring, etc.), but they are not equal. This means that a big part of teams’ performance will come down to their design decision-making process, and the best choice won’t be obvious. In contrast, the Nothing But Net season, for example, was largely the opposite of this, where designs converged quickly, and by mid-late season it largely came down to how consistent each robot’s flywheel was (granted there were some exceptions). I think a more decision-making approach is more reflective of actual engineering; after all, it’s about how to make the best solution to a given problem, not about reinventing the (fly)wheel.
This game probably requires more than one mechanism for interacting with the balls: for intaking, scoring, and descoring. In contrast, in Tower Takeover, most teams managed to use a single point of contact (side rollers and tray) for intaking, scoring stacks, and placing in towers. Sure, they composed multiple mechanisms in series, such as putting the tray on an angler, and putting that on a lift, but this is different from having separate mechanisms for interacting with cubes in different ways (i.e. putting them in parallel). Of course, this is only one way to analyze the game, but it shows how a little more creativity will be required.
Autonomous won’t be easy, and doing it well will be very hard. If the area of engineering which you’re interested in going into is software or controls, then this is probably a much more interesting year for you than many of the past seasons.
On the mechanical side, from looking over the game so far, I think that it’s a decently balanced game, in that improvements to a robot in almost any way—whether it’s drive speed, scoring consistency, ball capacity, etc.—will improve the team’s performance on the field fairly. This gives plenty of opportunity and incentive to tackle whatever challenges you have an idea for, because they will be beneficial.
Basically, my thoughts come down to this: it’s not exceedingly difficult to build, program and drive a robot that can compete in Change Up, even one that can do every score-affecting action that a robot is allowed to do, but that leaves it entirely open to teams to decide and experiment with how to improve from there, rather than spending an inordinate amount of time just getting something that works. It’s a much more open-ended challenge, which is where the real learning and ingenuity happens.
I also think that engineering could be tough, depending on the complexity you want on your robot. For example, do you want a walled cascade for balls? That sounds decently complex. Do you want multiple scoring mechanisms? I think this year’s engineering will be more complicated than tower takeover.
Robots will have to expand this year to have any hope of scoring (except for shoving balls into goals). This means that while the ceiling has been lowered, the entry bar has been raised. Unlike tower takeover or turning point, a clawbot is no longer sufficient to perform most tasks, amd teams will have to innovate
They said the AI sensors (gps, depth camera thing, etc) will be provided on registration for vex AI so I doubt they’d be allowed in VRC. I dm’d them to confirm but they haven’t responded yet.
I’m honestly really glad that the GDC went with a game that is a lot more simple because it’s going to leave room for a lot of different strategies and designs. Before the game was released, I was saying that I wanted at least three elements to keep matches interesting (tower takeover got really old really fast and matches weren’t super entertaining after the first few competitions) but even though Change Up has fewer elements and a much simpler design, there is going to be a lot of defensive strategies which we didn’t see much of in TT and it was an element that I really missed.
The game is growing on me. The tic tac toe element give it a lot of strategy, and the shorter goals are allowing for more design diversity than just gateway robots.
I like how the meta is progressing, it seems as though this year there’s going to be a bigger variety of robots and strategy involved. I was skeptical at first but now I feel that with the sameness of TT, we lost a lot of diversity so I feel like it’s going to be a good game this year.
tower takeover on cortex??? that won’t work. tower takeover is a game that requires a lot of torque, to carry around 10-12 cubes without slowing down, to intake 10-12 cubes and to have a good arm.
the motor distribution would be super funky:
6 motor drive, 4 motor intake, 1 motor tilter, 1 motor arm… that seems like a bad time
I have seen a MS team use cortex motors on a tray bot (only 9!). They could only stack 6, but with more torque-y intakes and a longer tray, it could be possible. A more feasible design would be a DR4B claw/vertical roller robot as they don’t need as torque-y of intakes that traybots need.