Pedestal Delays
 

At the Southfield District Event (MI) there were a few cases where the delay between an alliance clearing the field of balls and the pedestal being lit to allow the inbounder to grab the next ball.

I'm wondering if this was observed at other events, and how it was handled.

In one of our matches we had a 40 sec delay, and, because the delay wasn't explicitly observed during the match, it took a number of visits with the referees before we were granted a replay of the match.

Here is the video of the match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv-QUKZLWUQ

At 1:00 (video time) you see the last red auto-ball cleared from the field. At 1:45, you see the human player return with our first cycle ball. For about 40 seconds, the pedestal was not lit. You cannot see the pedestal in the video, however the problem is quite obvious.

While I'm generally against 'video reviews' of penalties and such during a match, I'm wondering if an exception should be allowed for cases such as this; where clear video evidence of a field/match fault exists that can be correlated with events observed on the field (supposedly, the ref marked the field as cleared shortly after the last ball was scored, but some delay caused the pedestal to not light).

I saw that in some cases even small delays often had a big impact on match flow, (where a robot sits and waits for a new ball as the old ball is cleared, but gives up after some delay to go defend, then ends up being late for the inbounder). I would expect these smaller delays will diminish over time as the refs get more experienced with the game; but there are some interesting situations introduced by the 'human' factor in the game.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Since this was experienced so much for all teams, the refs should have given a verbal go ahead to teams to take the ball. Rather than have to replay the matches. Would have helped the event stay on time. I hope they have this fixed for the next week of events.

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Hopefully an operator can describe how this works. It has to be manually turned on, I don't see how it can be automated.

We had an incident at MAR Mount Olive. Another team human player already had a ball ready to load a robot. When I turned around our human player had taken a ball off the pedestal. As coach I chased after him before he threw it onto the field and returned it to the pedestal. Here is where it becomes a blur. When I returned it to the pedestal the light was on.

At the end of the game the head ref approached me and I described the above. We were accessed a 50 point penalty but we had lost and didn't change the outcome of the match. Without proof I couldn't contest it.

Our human player is special education, so I started to doubt having him as the human player. I felt bad about this because in a later match, I watched him, he would NOT touch the ball until the pedestal lit. He is a great human player.

In a later match (not us) there was a field fault because that same pedestal light did not turn off. My theory is that in our match, once the first ball was taken, another ball was placed on it while it was still lit, but I can not prove it.

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This issue did pop up now and again at the Central Illinois Regional.

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This is, in fact, automated within the FMS (to an extent). The referee panels have a button which says end cycle. This is pressed when a ball is scored, and triggers the FMS to calculate score based on possessions and assists, and light up the pedestal among other things. There is something, somewhere in systems which is causing delays. I ref week 3, but I am told that there is a noticeable delay between the ref panels being touched and them accepting the input.

So basically, this appears to be a software issue, and hopefully will be fixed in time for week 2.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Is it my imagination, or is the audience actually yelling "NEW BALL" for those 40 seconds?

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That happened to us in a match as well. Luckily we where not penalized for it. It was near the end of one of our early matches noticed that suddenly we had two balls on the field. After the match talked with the drive team and the human player said that a ball was on the pedestal and it was lit so he put it onto the field. Noticed later in the event that the volunteers would not put the ball onto the pedestal until after the light went out. I think there was a little talk about it after that match.

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Yes. I know our team was all standing and shouting it by the 20 or 30 second mark, but I don't think we were the only ones (we were on the other side of the arena, blue shirts).

I also noticed there were some cases where the pedestal was lit (with no ball on it) when it shouldn't have been. I assumed I just forgot the conditions for it being lit.

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I'm not sure if it's the same match, but I saw this at Southfield when the bars rejected a goal. The ball bounced behind the goal for what seemed like a long time, and then the ball bounced back on the field. By that point, the refs had already awarded the goal and the pedestal lit up so a new ball was entered on the field. It was strange seeing two balls on the field.

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Yup, and then the pedestal remains lit until the referees record "something" happening with the ball (assist, truss, catch, goal ... SOMETHING). The field staff MAY inadvertently place the new ball on the pedestal while it's still lit, and if a team grabs that ball and enters it into the field that's a Field Fault. The field staff and referees were warned of this (since there's no way to detect the ball being removed from the pedestal) and now you are too. :)

-Danny

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

One of our matches the pedestal did not light up after autonomous so our coach was waving and shouting that it was not being lit. It was great that he made a commotion to get attention to it and the match was stopped and we restarted. But I agree, there is a delay with the pedestals and it has to be fixed. Albeit, it is a Week 1 so there are bound to be problems and FIRST will probably work out more of the kinks for Week 2.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

You might be correct in the latter. It doesn't go out until somebody possesses the ball--and a smart head ref/FTA combination has probably instructed Field Reset in the strongest of terms that a ball is never to be placed onto a lit pedestal.

If the pedestal doesn't light up after autonomous, double-check that all your auto balls are off of the field. If they are, then the ref may have been asleep (or hit the wrong button and had to undo it, which kind of stinks).

I agree with tanmaker--the ref panels are slow, their connections are slow... (The head ref I worked with this weekend had a number of complaints about the head ref panel, including delays and lack of ability to see what everybody else was putting in.) When I would put in starting balls, it could take several seconds to register after a touch, and sometimes it would unregister randomly.

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Yes, and this was not the only problem we had at mount olive. Many replays had to be done because of pedestal delays, including a quarterfinal match that ended up overturning the result of the series. This really needs to be amended. Great job at the competition this weekend by the way 4381!

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We had a similarly long delay and, though fault was acknowledged, we were flatly denied a replay in a match with a four point losing margin--despite citing rules and not a little pleading from students. A similar long field crew delay happened in a match we lost by 1 point, where again the fault was acknowledged without a replay. The head ref, thankfully, began pausing matches to sort out the light, but even then some pauses came at least 10 seconds after the ball scored. (Time was paused, not backed up--we restarted another match with 2 seconds left on the clock.)

We were far from an edge case. There were a lot of very frayed nerves across many teams, and I'm frankly proud of everyone for their handling of it. Still, I hope FIRST understand objectively how big an affect this has. It literally changed alliance selection (the matches involved captains and those who would have been in a captain seed), and directly affects MAR rankings, at first glance by ~10% for some teams. Refs shouldn't be burdened with these kinds of calls.

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At our regional, it became rather ugly at times with the crowd shouting at the ref about the pedastal to the point of obscenities. Luckily the student (a spectator) cursing at the ref was asked to leave by adults on his own team. Several of our mentors volunteered to ref at the regional and in our discussions last night, a couple of them are having second thoughts about reffing at the next regional, they were just so frustrated and really didn't like everyone yelling at them about the pedestal which they couldn't fix/control.

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It was also frustrating for our mentors refereeing since it's so hard to keep score and ref simultaneously. It was difficult for me at times to keep calm when there were one or two assists not being counted during a cycle, or multiple cycles, but you can't blame the refs or get angry at them. They just have way too much on their plate.

The most frustrating part of all is when you consider that all the teams devote hours and hours of their time to make their robot work, and spend so much of their funds to enter a competition; then they waste $300 to $500 in entry cost on a match where the loss was not the fault of any of the teams, but rather the field.

We also had delays with declaring dead balls at IE. On one our matches, the ball was stuck in our robot towards the beginning of the match, and the ball was not declared dead until up to around 30-40 seconds after we signaled that it was no good for play, and finally the match had to be restarted because of this.

We also had another match that started perfectly; the autonomous shots went in, and we were far ahead, until I started wondering why our human players weren't inbounding after the first cycle. What was the problem? The pedestal would not light at all, and there was a rematch, and then the pedestal was delayed, and then we had to do another rematch the next day.

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Thanks, Cam877. And congratulations to team 11. Even though you didn't win your 3 match semi-final it could have easily gone your way.

Now I feel like a chump for not arguing the pedestal foul. First of all, the confusion altered the outcome of the game in some way. This was really a rematch situation and I should have protested it, assuming there is a way to do that. I did tell them that the light was on so that should have been enough.

The game is better than I first thought but we need smooth play and not these glitches.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Hoover,

For future reference: Have a pre-college student on the drive team stand in the referee question box. That is the way to ask questions/clarifications/point out issues. For something like the pedestal issue, it's important to let the nearest referee/FTA know DURING the match.

The precedent at Mt. O was that the pedestal not lighting up correctly was an arena fault, and several matches in qualifications were replayed because of this. That's what Alliance 2 contested in the QFs, and one of the affected matches in the series was replayed. (QF 3-2 and 3-3 were both affected by pedestal issues, but since we didn't make it known in 2 -during- the match, it was not replayed. We made the field crew aware of it in 3, and QF 3-3 was replayed for that arena fault, overturning the series.)

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Thanks Libby. This was in the earlier matches and we were still getting used to the game. I had one eye on the pedestal every match after that. I think we'd have been better off letting Jason throw the second ball on the field and then they'd have to had to investigate during the game.

As for having a student go to the question box... our alliances always pulled the control boards and left the field immediately. We had 2 instances of us winning in qualification and then an upset re-score occurring minutes after. We were half way back to the pits. I don't know what to do. I'm half way leaning to have the whole darned alliance stay put, arms crossed until the final scoring happens and then go as a unit (pre-college only) to the question box to at least get an explanation. That seems rather extreme.

I will say I was really really hoping for real time scoring this year and I am not getting it.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

However Libby, I hate to say that the reffing was not consistent with this. A 10 to 20-second pedestal delay affected our alliance in Semifinal Match 1-3, and one of the refs even said during the match to end it and replay it. However, the match went on (I guess the head ref maybe didn't see him? I don't know), and after our student drive coach went to the question box after the match, the head ref said, in short, "Too bad, we're not going to replay it, and if you had taken the ball off of the pedestal when it was not lit up but it should have been, I wouldn't have fouled you." How on earth we were supposed to know that though after other alliances had been penalized for touching the ball too early without the light on beforehand, I do not know. This was very upsetting, especially with the similar events prior matches resulting in the opposite, more logical course of action.

With all of these replays and scores changing after their displayed, I offer a suggestion: Show the score to the drive teams first. Then let them try to plead with what they may. After all things are finally worked out, then put them on the screen for the rest of the audience and the webcast to see. It would make it so much less dramatic.

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Actually, this is almost exactly what you need to do. If a non pre-college student comes to my question box, I immediately send them away to get a student that I can talk to. What can be done is have a student representative of each team wait behind to find the score and contest anything if they deem it necessary. To my knowledge, there is no rule preventing mentors and adults from helping take the robot off the field or grab the drivers stations.

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The 'catch', if you can call it one, is that it's just about impossible to get near the field without a driver badge. Strictly speaking only the drive team (including the human player and in some cases the safety captain) are allowed on the field to move the robot. Some volunteers might let it slide, others won't.

Realistically, you send one of your drivers/human player to the question box. That's probably fine 99% of the time, since they presumably know the rules and what happened during the match, but it does mean you're down a drive team member for moving the robot. In the past I've had the driver in charge of the controls hang back if I thought there might be a problem, while I the other driver and human player handle the robot.

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At CIR (Central Illinois Regional) we had the same issue in the finals, it was frustrating. I hope at Wisconsin they have it fixed.

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I'm curious as to what rule you're referencing. The only rule regarding a coach is that they may not touch balls or controls during a match. Other than that, there are no rules preventing them from entering the field.

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4 students on the drive team. One goes to the question box, one takes the driver station to the cart and pulls that over, the other two get the robot. I don't see where the problem is...

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You don't know because this in nonsense. The refs should be more angry about this than we are. They shouldn't have to make these kinds of decisions, the system should just work. I find it distressing they put this on you.

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I'm not saying that a coach can't enter the field, only that you have 4 (sometimes 5) people available to handle the robot, only one of which can be a coach.

Again, I don't think it's ever really a problem getting a student in the question box and handling the robot, but you are limited to the drive team and have to get in the habit of having someone stay behind to ask questions if need be. It's not really problem but if you aren't planning for it it can be.

I don't either as long as you plan ahead for that. This year might be the first time that some teams have needed to use the question box, either because they are rookies or vets that just never have. I'm just pointing out that it's a good idea to leave a driver behind to ask questions incase something comes up.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

A related issue at Hatboro-Horsham was a ball going out of play (commonly over the goal, not through it) and it never being returned to play by field crew. Then the refs/pedestal operator know there is supposed to be a ball in play while there is none.

All I can say is this will get better at week 2 and 3 competitions.

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Agreed, but it shows strength if one or more from each alliance stands together. One team had a foul in our quarter-final match that knocked us out. It was being contested but when we got there only one member of that team was in the box. The whole alliance is affected so it follows the whole alliance should be concerned.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Yes, the whole alliance should be concerned... but that doesn't mean you have to overwhelm the head ref with people. A persons natural reaction to facing a gang of upset people is defensive - you're less likely to get what you want if you send a bunch of people up there all at once to yammer at the head ref. The alliance should work on clearing out the field like they're supposed to, quickly and efficiently, so the next match can start like it's supposed to. If they are all concerned, they can respectfully wait by the exit from the arena to hear the result from the one well spoken student who went up to the question box. Trust me, the ref will see that the entire alliance is waiting for the answer, but he won't feel a need to immediately go on the defensive.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

I hear ya. No need to go ape.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Judging from the Israeli webcast, it looks like they may have fixed the bug that dealt with the Pedestal lights.

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Actually, that first match, one of your alliance's very early shots (I want to say auto!) missed wide left. As in, between me (scoring the red goals) and the wall. Not through the wall, not over the wall, to the left of the wall. That's where field reset made a mistake and ran the ball clear back to your driver's station, instead of the nearest human player (in the red box to my right, between me and the head ref), which resulted in the foghorn sounding for immediate replay.

Then the pedestal problem kicked in in the rematch.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

This is simple... There is a problem. FIRST needs to fix it. Please and thank you. ::rtm::

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

It has been. FMS software changes have no association with rule changes and thus are not included in rule updates.

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An official mention of it somewhere would be great, though. Totally possible I missed one, in that case, where can I see it?

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...-Week-1-Review

Frank Mentions it today in the blog post, it is fixed.

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I will believe it when I see it. If we get a dead pedestal like our district mates 1676 (see above), my alliance is going to take that ball and deal with the consequences later.

Now if they can only get rid of these outrageous re-scores. We play to the real time score and we think we are good with a 10 point lead... the boom... the final score has them winning by 30 points. I'm not going to be comfortable with anything less than a 50 point lead from now on. We must count the scores in our heads (along with everything else we need to do) and be prepared to challenge.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

When was the last time live scores were at all accurate? Breakaway is the only one that I can think of that was semi accurate since I started back in 2009. Basing your playing strategy off of the live scores has always been a risky decision.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

2012 worked fairly well (of course the bridge balances weren't added til after the match).

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The Israeli regional was much better in this aspect.

There was only one REALLY bad issue I recall... the Red Alliance scored a goal in one of the Qualification Matches, and the volunteer still hadn't put a ball on the pedestal (he had a long time to do it - since the start of the cycle, but he forgot I guess).

Anyway, the pedestal got lit .. but since there was no ball on it, he FORBADE the HP to take a ball from the ground next to the pedestal, and wasted a minute and a half before the refs fianlly noticed and allowed the HP to take the ball.

Luckily, Red still won because of 100 foul points...

I will say however, that it was the only incident I saw which was a real issue. Pedestals nearly always lit up within 5 seconds of a cycle completing. In fact, I don't recall a time where it was more than 5 seconds... :)

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Good point, 2012 was another decent year at live scoring. Any time the scoring pieces are able to be funneled after scoring for counting it helps. But, most years this is not possible.

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I didn't see any issues with the 2011 scoring either, since it was largely done by humans.

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It wasn't bad, but the live scoring was definitely delayed and scores changed from the live scoring to the final score being displayed.

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That was the last year penalties were added on at the end of the match. That's likely the difference you saw.

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Right, but my point is, using the live score as a way to base your play hasn't been a good way to base your strategy since it is not usually highly accurate. And I wouldn't count on that changing in future games.

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As much as I like and appreciate Frank's post and all the work that went into it, the blog makes no direct mention of pedestal lights at all. More refs, better field reset, and fewer FMS bugs are all great (as are the better foul rules and high goals), but do these account for all the roots causes of pedestal delays? I don't know, and Frank hasn't told me. It seemed that at least some of them were just a failure to hit "End Cycle", which is not a ref-quantity, reset-training, or FMS-quality issue.

More importantly, neither the team update nor the blog prevent a head ref from deciding that a 30 second pedestal delay is not worth a foghorn/replay. Personally, this was my major Week 1 problem. Heck, it doesn't say anything about handling a 2:19 second pedestal delay.

As long as such a devastating failure mode is theoretically possible (which is always--remember the 2011 minibot towers?), I'd like official guidance on how to handle it.

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Last year with all the Frisbees flying there was little hope of live scoring. But this year come on. If they scored a ball even every 15 seconds how hard can that be? Every time we turned our heads to the score board and saw it react the way we expected. Where did all the extra points come from in the final scoring? Our alliance, people in the audience, they'd all be scowling at the score board so it not just me. But it is our fault for not going to the question box.

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I'd like to see you try to Ref week 1.

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As a referee at Mt. Olive, you're just totally overexagerrating the parity between live scoring and actual scoring. Here are the only situations in which the final score would be 'vastly different' from the live scoring:
1. Fouls
2. A last second cycle input
3. The very few times where a cycle was inputted incorrectly (which, to me at least, only happened once).

To say that a significant amount of unexplained extra points showed up on the board after the match is absolutely wrong. And if an alliance is scoring a ball every 15 seconds? That makes it even harder for the refs.

Speaking with fellow refs, 99% of the time there was a delay (even as small as 3 seconds) in putting in the livescore was to just last minute check to make sure everything is right. Would you rather us rush to input scores and mess them up? (which I admittedly did once, but noticed it and ensured the score was corrected).

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The other situation that can drastically affect live scoring is if a ball has gone through the high goal, the ref scores it and ends the cycle, but the ball ends up popping out. If that happened at the end of a match, you could see up to a 40 point difference between live scoring and final scoring.

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In all fairness to all the volunteers at the events. I would ask that you really take a realistic look at what actually happens during a match from any years game before you criticize some of the things that occur.

Volunteering at an event will really open your eyes to how things work. ;)

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On top of this, they're asking refs to literally do the work of 2 people. Being a ref is never an easy job. But we do it because we enjoy the challenge.

Week 1 refs were just as frustrated as teams were. The delay in tablets and the FMS affected them just as much as the teams did. The good news from all of this is that a lot of issues have been fixed and the game and competition will only get better as the weeks pass. I'm sorry that some teams only had one shot during a week 1 regional, but they should all (minus rookies) be aware that week 1 will not go perfectly, or even smoothly most of the time.

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Lets dial this back a bit. Steven, you were there, I was there, I know hard a day it was especially since they tried to do almost all the qualifying on Saturday due to the impending storm. We were disappointed so we vented.

This is my third year and I finally have a couple of students I think are hooked on robotics. Their reaction? They'd play a third venue if we could afford it. To me that is a win we've never had before.

In the spirit of FRC lets let this go and hope for improvements on week 2.

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It's a rush when you have students asking about going to a third competition after competing isn't it. We had this happen last year and its very rewarding to hear it.

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There were several issues like this at the palmetto regional. ALL the teams and the outstanding head ref handled each case with GP. If the delay possibly affected the outcome of the match, the match was replayed.

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That's great to hear. Good for you on getting your team excited about the program

Best of luck!