Dominance of pushers at AWS46

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

I don't think banning 4WD was a serious suggestion. You cant anyway. The AWS prides itself on allowing all (rule-abiding) robots, however 'boring' the fights may be. This topic was about the arena being bias in favour of pushers, which I think has been pretty much addressed and exhausted.

Also, to blame Stanley is reductionist. Hib started the discussion and he was including his EDF robots as "pushbots" too, which he stated he built purely to try and win, in a competition that Stanley was dominating.

A pushbot should never not be a viable option. If that's what you want to build, that's what you build. But its when you build one because you feel you HAVE to to win that it becomes a problem.

[peterwaller]

I have been giving the arena design quite a bit of thought lately and here are my conclusions for what they are worth.
1 It must fit in my car, preferable assembled, which means it can be a maximum of 1000W x 1300L x 650H although the 1000 reduces at the top.
2 Usually you loose around 300mm off the length for the drop off zone which brings us back to 1000 x 1000 actual arena.
3 Most seem agreed that we can reduce the 50% drop off rule but not by too much to keep it fair for pushers and beginners or people like me who can't drive.
4 I find the fights tend to get slow and boring when robots get stuck in corners.( I know this will be controversial to some)
Putting all these together ( and I am not claiming this design is original) I have come up with an arena that is basically 1000 x 1300 but with each corner being a drop off.
This means that although the drop off is reduced to 36% it should still be possible for pushers to be very effective while giving the maximum area of usable arena.
By making the polycarbonate cover curved it reduces the width at the top while maintaining the arena area.
Here is a rough sketch of my thoughts.

I shall now duck my head back below the parapet and let battle commence.
Just done a quick calculation this gives 13000 sq cm as opposed the one we used in wales which gives 14400 sq cm.

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

Looks great. Like a pool table.

[EpicentrE]

That looks like a good design Peter, and is a lot better than many of our current designs (although I personally still prefer a little less drop off than it looks like you have there), however in my eyes it has one main problem, which is that it's possible for a pusher to just slide their opponent down a wall into a pit. This was why we added the small corner walls to our arena, which everyone seemed to agree were a good addition.

Edit: Currently you're sitting at around 35% drop off. If you added 5cm long walls to each side of each pit, you'd be sitting at 25% drop off (which was a generally agreed upon number last time we suggested this), and you'd diminish the effectiveness of wall-sliding. What do you think?

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

He's gone Scott, he cant hear you. :-p

[peterwaller]

Yes I thought people might pick up on that I was trying to get a compromise between reducing the drop off and making it pusher freindly.
I was proposing to have thin polycarb walls along the fully walled sides to stop the main polycarb sheets getting scratched they could extended around the diagonals a little.

[EpicentrE]

That sounds like a really good idea. It's impossible to know without testing it in an event, but it sounds like with those extra walls at the sides of the pits it'll tick all the boxes. I'm interested to hear other's opinions.

You have my support, and I'm happy to put a donation towards it.

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

He's back Scott, he heard you.

[Hogi]

this looks brilliant Peter. i like this design very much. i also agree with the corner walls to prevent wall sliding thing. i'm not sure how long these would need to be for an antweight arena but the ones on my new nanoweight arena are 5cm.

[BeligerAnt]

Whilst I like the concept, I can see an immediate problem with the triangular pits.

The effective drop-off is nowhere near 35cm wide because at the ends the "length"/"width" of the pit goes to zero, so there is no pit for a robot to fall into. Whilst continuing low walls around the corners would help to alleviate the problem they would not be a complete cure.

The existing rules specify (or suggest, I can't remember) that pits should be at least 125mm wide. This rule was added to avoid the issue of robots being pushed out but bouncing off the back wall of the pit back into the arena. This was a real problem which happened on enough occasions for us to devise a rule to combat it. I think this is something we need to continue to enforce in arena designs to prevent recurrence of an old problem.

The 35cm triangles only actually provide a drop-off of 10cm where the pit is more than 125mm wide, four drop-offs add up to only about 8% of the total perimeter!

On the subject of wall heights, the current rules suggest 5cm. Again this was arrived at after much consideration. High enough to prevent driving out, possible to lift an opponent over (even with a simple servo-powered lifter) and even (sometimes) possible to push an opponent over with a good pusher!