FLL Mission Overview Part 10 - Personal Vehicle Choice
Objective: Bring the yellow car to the house's property and take the red truck back to the parking lot or to the farm (white area enclosed by the two rivers).Point Worth: 25 points.
Mission Location: Near the Northwest (top left) corner of mat.
Estimated Difficulty Rating: 6/10
Time Length Rating: Long
Unique Challenge Aspects: Requires you to both deliver and retrieve mission objects.
For this mission, your robot has to move one object (the car) from base to a location, and another object (the truck) to base from a location. Also, the delivery location of the car might not be directly adjacent to the truck (it can be anywhere in the property of the house). These two factors make this a somewhat tricky mission, and we may be seeing some teams completing this in multiple runs.
-Jonathan
Comments
One of the thing I need clarification on and not sure if it has been covered in a post here is: for the mission challenges do the kids have to combine all the missions they will be attempting into one program or can they have the robot complete a mission and return to the base, where the kid can start the second mission by running the second program and also in the process aim the robot or position it in the right direction.
Thanks in advance
Linda
Also, what is a decent score? Or decent number of missions to attempt.
For the vehicle choice mission some teams may use three robot excursions to score the 25 points. My team does most of the mission in one excursion, and the remaining bit as part of another. With so many tasks to perform this year it is very important to combine multiple activities into one robot program.
The last time I checked my team has the robot return to base 6 times in the course of completing all the missions. They are trying to cut that down to have enough time for the robot to perform an interpretive dance as time expires.
Linda's right about returning to base - my team does a lot of that.
As for a good number of points... it really depends on what the team members are up to. 200 is great score, and at my state tournament (New Jersey), a 300 last year (probably less this year, because of the harder challenge) would have won the Robot Performance if you don't count my team.
-Jonathan
It is possible to post a respectable score without a lot of talent. Our team scored 200 points by doing just the easy "push-it-there" missions (4 trees in one place, 2 wind turbines in one place, satellite, grid connex to one property with hydro-dam, and then push the wave turbine). We put these missions together in 4 hours.
Unfortunately, we probably lack the ability/talent to perform any of the other missions, even with 5 weeks until tournament time.
It's fun, though. We chose the easiest missions, and the kids (9 and 10 yrs old) had blast.
Our qualifying round (we are in upstate NY) is this Saturday. We must clear this for the Dec event. We also decided to go with simple push technique.
Another quick question: we are doing the missions as multiple programs. We have the robot return to the base at the end of each mission, where we select the next program and aim the robot with the payload. :-) We find that for some missions, the robot does not come back completely into the base area. Is it okay to pull it in or if gets stuck outside the base, can we pull it in. Will there be a penalty?
-Jonathan
Today our team participated in the qualifying round and we have advanced into the regionals to be played on Dec 9th.
We used simple push technique, and were able to score 180, 185, and 215 in the three rounds. The top score was 270 at our competition center. I didn't get much chance to look at other teams. But most were using the push technique with some help from optical and US sensor.
Thanks for the help.
Are those scores you posted raw scores, or do they include any RCX Bonus Points, which would be 60 points at this scoring level.
I'm very disappoinited with the RCX bonus this year. It's far too many points and it's applied very poorly. I think that teams that used the NXT last year should not be allowed to use the RCX just to increase their scores.
I don't think I saw an RCX based robot at our qualifying round center.