Einstein 2014
 

I don't have any other great method of getting the answers out of those involved in decisions around Einstein 2014, and I feel like if teams who played in the semifinals and specfically the finals match were willing to discuss their thoughts behind decisions made on the field in a public forum, it would be a great benefit to a lot of people. With the 2014 competition season over, I know I am left wit ha few questions.

To 1114:
When did you guys decide you were going to add on a goalie stick?

Why did you add it on (as in, was this specifically for "if we run into the Poofs on Einstein finals", or another reason)?

How were you controlling your robot during the hybrid period?

Was part of your goalie strategy that you get quick turnaround on cycles coming out of autonomous, or was that a secondary benefit?

To 254:
Why did you stick with the given autonomous strategy after the first match after seeing how close 1114 was getting to you guys?

What caused the misses in autonomous in F2? From my viewpoint I could have sworn 1114 made bumper on bumper contact with you, but I'm not sure.

I think I know the answer to this, but why not give a ball to every team in F3 since all robots were already in the white zone?

Why not accept a possible 15 point deduction on ignoring hot goal detection to avoid the 1114 menace?

Do you think you would you have made those shots in autonomous with or without the pick 469 attempted?

To 973:

Did you intentionally leave the goalie zone, or were you trying to see how far you could push the zone before breaking it, or was it just a glitch?

That's all I have for now. If anyone has more questions or wants to generate idle speculation before we get answers, I guess they can go in here.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Instead of directly answering the question, I will let you do some math.

Leaving the zone is 50 pts. In that match the red robots had 1 ball each, 2 total. So we were preventing 20 points at most .

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I'm not 1114, but http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=128639

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I count 90 foul points.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

This is exactly what our strategy team was thinking about after watching Einstein. We were wondering why Simbotics didn't come out of the zone a bit more or all the way out with their stick down and hit the Poofs to save at least 20 points of auton.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I've actually heard second-hand that they used a kinect.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

In there case the math is different, but I'd wager they still didn't want to take a tech.

In our case it was obvious mistake and was not intentional.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Even better.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

This is also what I saw from the stands. 1114 had a student standing to the side of the driver station in front of what looked like a Kinect.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Since a couple people already mentioned it, I can confirm that 1114 used a Kinect. Four teams on Einstein (1114, 254, 469, 973) had some form of driver station input during "autonomous" mode.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

And I'll second this confirmation as I discussed it with several of their students. They had a lot of very cool kinect options for that goal pole as well as for hot goal detection.

If any of you ever get a chance to have a really in depth view of that robot from a controls perspective I think you'll be very educated. Their students were able to effectively explain everything they did. Kudos to them.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

This is interesting because it is actually more complicated than that. You also have to factor in the cost of a missed auto ball.

One could consider this 'ungracious' or egregious (red card), but it's technically within the rules (just as famous examples of rule loopholes):

Have I missed something?

EDIT: I think Chris Endres beat me to it.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

As has already been stated, the actions you could have incurred could have ranged from 20-90 points on a 20 point ball. I couldn't remember if the robot that 973 was attempting a block on had either one ball or 2 until I saw the video.

There are incidences and specific scenarios where you could leave or almost leave the goalie zone in an attempt to thwart autonomous and it count as an actual net benefit provided you do not get a red card.

However, as always, it's a pleasure.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

His point is it would have been idiotic for 973 to intentionally leave the zone in order to prevent ~4x less points than they would have given the other alliance by doing so.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I'd like to first say that 1114 having a goalie pole and hybrid auto mode was about as "shocking" to us a our having a low goal 3 ball (neither of us was at all shocked).

Sticking with the three ball auto was a calculated risk. We decided that the chance their actual pole would block the shots to be very low. The danger was all in the position of their claw. The claw came between our front ball and the low goal in F2, and was actually pinning our front intake down in F3 (intake came free in time to score the last ball).

We discussed not going hot before each match and decided that they would likely be able to legally put something (claw or robot) between us and the goal in time.

We also discussed running a two ball mode that lined up on the edge of the field and drove straight (shooting one ball on the run and one near the front of the low goal. This involved bringing 74 off the bench and having them run a 1 ball (these guys had an impressive 10/10 one ball auto in quals). I asked Adam (67) what he thought we should do. His advice was the "safer" choice, bring 74 in and everyone run from the side, still getting all the balls hot.

We thought about doing this, but the last minute change (bringing in a fresh team to Einstein) and giving our opponents the mental edge that'd forced us off of our bread and butter didn't seem like the right thing to do.

In the practice match on Einstein, we ran 2848's modified auto. It was programmed to run full speed into the goalie zone and deploy their brake plate. The idea being they could stop 1114, or slow them down, allowing us to gain position to fire the 3 balls into the hot goal.

It was just after sending Dan and my operator back to the field with this strategy that Adam turned to me and said "You guys are nuts. This is chaos. How do you know that they (2848) won't crash into you?! How do you know they won't both crash into you?!"

My response was that I trusted our (254) programming team, we'd run 2848's blocking auto on the field already. At this point my heart was about to pop and everyone near me (Jess B, Adam H., & Adam F) probably thought I was going to pass out.

In the end I don't know if we would have made the shots w/o 2848's block, I know we had made and missed once before without it, and that something had to happen to try and stop 1114 from gaining position on us in F3.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

We talked about a goalie stick during our brainstorming session after kickoff. At one point there were even discussions about goaltending being our primary strategy, as we felt it would be the easiest way to differentiate ourselves from the pack. Ultimately it ended up lower on our priority list, but it remained on our minds.

On ship weekend, one of our new junior mentors spent some time experimenting with the Kinect (see below), and we realized that we could implement a framework that would allow us to have almost complete control over our robot during the autonomous period. Since we saw that the Q&A had made using the Kinect during autonomous legal, we suddenly realized that we could do something very cool with goalie stick during auton.

We had hoped to add the goalie atick in time for Waterloo since we knew we be playing some of the best teams in the World at that event, unfortunately we weren't able to get things done in time. So it was pushed back to a Windsor/Champs item. After Waterloo work began on the goalie stick, and we even installed the first stage of the stick in Windsor, in the spot where our infamous broken wing from Waterloo went. We were somewhat surprised that no one really questioned this random large piece of square aluminum tubing on our robot. The rest of the stick was completed after Windsor, and added to the practice robot.

Once we realized we could use the Kinect to drive the robot, we knew that a goalie stick would provide an immense amount of strategic options. All year long we saw that missed balls dramatically lowered the scoring potential of alliances, so forcing even a single miss could be devastating. We knew that plenty of teams had multiple ball autonomous modes, so we could go to the Goalie Zone and only cost us 5 points. Very minor compared to potential denial of points from both autonomous balls and delayed cycles. Also, we knew that an effective goalie stick would make us a more attractive partner to a strong team with a multiple ball autonomous mode. (Such as the Poofs)

We used a Kinect located in the alliance station. Here's a brief description from our soon to be published design notebook.

- The detected arm position is mapped to a specific location in the goalie zone
- Range of the arm height is modified from between -1 and 1 to between 0 and 100 for more accurate control on drive movement, which is corrected using gyroPID and encoderPID
- Balance control using gyro and voltage to avoid unintended turning or tipping and to stay within the 6” cylinder
- Returns to original position if no arms are detected


Basically the Kinect gave us the ability to drive to any position within the goalie zone. Of course, we knew that many teams would simply line up against the wall as a counter move. Hence we came up with the move where we curved and drove as far out of the goalie zone as possible, and then lowered our claw. The hope here was to block any robots who needed to be right in that front corner.

It wasn't the main reason, but it was definitely a benefit. We even did this with non goalie stick partners like 5288 in Windsor.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Precisely. Neither of us are new to this game, and our teams are very open with each other. (We definitely discussed our Kinect abilities and goalie plans with the Poofs during a social gathering and cultural exchange in Waterloo.)

Re: Einstein 2014
 

This move in F3 was one of the greatest strategic maneuvers in FRC history. I remember watching the Curie Alliance set up those three robots and telling Ben (1114 Drive Coach) something like "dude, I think they're trying to block your goalie, what's our move?" What a mind game!

Far and away the best matches I've ever had the pleasure of coaching. Huge congrats to all teams involved, it was a battle to the very end!

-Mike

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Same story here.

I feel we were the most (or close to it) effective blockers, and this was because we had a mutually beneficial arms race with them all season. Our blocker had the ability to deploy and rotate and block in front of either low goals, all because of the time they put into countering the original blocker threat.

We never ran this feature as we were "Saving" it for poofs, but in hindsight we should've deployed it in front of us on 1678's 2 ball in SF 2.

Being down there talking with Adam and EJ was amazing for that play, trying to offer 254 the frame of mind that we had blocking, to help figure out 1114's move. I advised their play in F3 was incredibly ballsy and risky, but it sure as heck worked out for them. I'm glad they didn't listen!

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I was watching the video Team 20 posted of F2, and it actually looks like 1114 never touched any of the balls. The first ball just shot low, and it looks like the second ball was one of the most unlucky shots this year because it went all the way through, then bounced back out.

But all of the mind games on Einstein were absolutely incredible, and using 2848 to block in F3 was one of the ballsiest moves I have EVER seen in FRC, but it payed off, and that match came down to the WIRE.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

A mind game indeed. We programmed that blocker with plate auton mode in between the finals on Curie and Einstein. 254 and the rest of the alliance was confidant in their 3ball, which had hit in all but 1 matches on curie and we had decided just to run the standard drive forward auton until we needed the blocker, because of how risky the blocking the blocker move actually is. If we had ended up in the wrong spot we probably would have done more damage to 254's auton than 1114 if they had hit us from behind. Since it worked fine in the 1st match we figured it would in the second match also, but that claw move by the simbots was the perfect disrupter, causing our alliance to be out of position and preventing getting in our groove until there was already quite the lead.

The 3rd match was the big gamble, where we had to do something. Initially we had talked about skipping the hot goal completely and having us set a pick for the simbots toward the middle of the goalie zone with the poofs going to the right. But the "wall mode auton" had only run successfully on the left on the field. So the decision was made literally at the last second to do the really risky block that we played, just trying to buy 254 a few seconds of un-interrupted shooting.

It is amazing to think about it with only 30 points separating the 2 alliances at the end of match 3 that any small mis-step on either side could have made the difference.

From 2848 I would like to thank our partners 254, 469, and 74 it was an awesome ride. Thanks for seeing the potential in our machine, even though we had a roller coaster of a qualifications.

I would also like to say that 1114, 1678, 1640, 5136, 1477, 2590, 1625, and 3467 it was great playing with you. My teams are always inspired by the best in the world and to get an opportunity to play with you on the biggest stage will be something we always remember.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Could someone explain why 1678 decided to only run their 1 ball auto in the semifinal matches?

Re: Einstein 2014
 

No attempt to hijack this thread, but thought I should point out that the blocking run by 2848 in the finals had already been used successfully by our robot against 469 in our second quarter final on Curie, allowing our partner Code Orange to hit both auto goals. It was risky for sure...high speed ramming 50 pt foul possible if we had hit them instead of slamming into the wall in front of them, but given the firepower of the Poofs alliance we figured, "what the heck".:D Congrats to the best alliance at Champs this year!

Re: Einstein 2014
 

We flat out missed the first ball in F2. While we are pretty accurate, we aren't perfect. Because of the geometry of our robot, the dynamics of shooting the first, second, and third ball during the 3-ball slightly changes from shot to shot (and we actually have slightly different RPM setpoints for all three). The first shot of the three ball does not have the rear intake stowed to assist (with the roller in reverse when shooting), and is the most sensitive to ball inflation. Larger balls can sometimes go low, which is what I think happened here.

The miss was not caused by 1114 and likely would have happened with any 3-ball mode (yes, there are other auto modes at the ready that were never run on a competition field). The second ball may have been affected by the first bounceback; normally, we shoot at the goals at an angle so that any unfortunate bounces do not come straight back at the robot. The missed ball hit our robot and momentarily rocked it forward and may have caused the second miss. This is the real power of goalie poles...they force you into running higher risk auto modes, even if no goalie is perfect.

We have missed two or more balls of the 3-ball only two other times during the season (not counting times when an alliance partner runs into us) and both times were before the latest revision of our hood and RPM presets, so I felt pretty good that it wouldn't happen again. We may not have run the wall auto many times in real matches, but it has been run dozens if not hundreds of times on the practice robot and in practice matches. All the data we had gathered over our 77 prior official matches, practice matches, and practice robot suggested that the odds of whiffing twice in a row were very low. Fate was on our side.

EDIT: Best vid of F1-2 auto I have seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA0mE6HIMSc

Re: Einstein 2014
 

973 ran a blocker that could be on either the front or back of their machine. This meant they could choose which auto mode to block (1678 and 1640 both ran straight auto modes down the sides), and unless your shot was perfectly above the 1pt goal, you could be blocked. Our auto mode had a slight lean to the left and our shot was not consistently straight, so we didn't want to clean up two blocked balls after auto. Hence why we only ran 1 ball each.

In F1 and F2, we ran two balls, even thought 469 had a goalie blocker. This is because they couldn't flip what side the pole was on their bot. It meant we had a wider "safe zone" setting up our 2 ball on the side their goalie blocker was not on. To 1640's credit, their auto mode was dead straight and got past a goalie bot at least a few times.

-Mike

Re: Einstein 2014
 

These decisions and conversations are the reason I dream about getting onto Einstein all year long! Being able to talk strategy, counter-moves, risk with the best minds in the game is incredible.

After listening to EJ and Dan's conversation, I told our guys to pay special attention to Auton, things were going to get very interesting. I was so nervous for EJ's call. Go big or go home! I am usually a very conservative decision maker out there....especially with inital strategies. I was extremely impressed with EJ, Dan, and Travis' decision to line that up and run 2848 in there to block. I think both Adam Heard and I would have made the conservative call.

From our side, the threat of 1114's goalie pole made us position our robot so far out to the edge, that it forced out "100% in elims on Galileo" 2-ball auto to miss the 2nd ball in SF1-1. I did not expect them to be able to block either ours or 2481's auto balls if we pushed them out to the edge. I was extremely surprised to see 1114 positioned barely inside the goalie zone to block 2481's ball.

On Galileo, one of the biggest reasons we selected 973 was because of the goalie pole. We played an extermely aggressive defense first strategy, and having our opponents start the match having to clear an auto ball played right into that strategy.

I started having nightmares the week before Champs, as soon as I realized Cheesy Vision and Kinect would mean human controlled goalie poles. We probably should have had a contingency other than over the low goal to try and counter.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Was that JVN I saw down behind the drivers coaching the winning alliance?

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Yup, credit for the idea goes to your alliance. It was a great maneuver which is why we added it.


Nope, that was 74's coach who was in the box with us the whole time helping to be an extra set of eyes on the field.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

Glad to be of help :D. Just kidding, congratulations and well played by the entire alliance! Every match was a sight to behold, from Curie to Einstein.

Speaking of which...does anyone have video of any of the Curie elims? Specifically the Semifinals in which 254's alliance played.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I just wanted to say I thought Einstein 2014 was the best set of matches I have ever seen in my 10 years of FIRST. The crowd loved it, I loved it, and the matches made me forget how much I hated this game. They were clean matches, with crazy defense and crazy impressive scoring from the best teams in FIRST. Thanks to those teams that worked so hard to make there and congrats!

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I must say drawing a parallel from being a college sports fan specifically college football.

I and everyone else around me had the same euphoric feeling you get during awesome plays and close games that in that last final that you had us all on our feet for the last minute of the F-3 match. We were in the nosebleeds and it still had that overwhelming effect. I'm not sure how common that is for an Einstein final, but it was for me that's the best there has been.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

That decision probably was the difference. Two of your balls were deflected by 1114, and if Simbotics could have gotten over just a couple more inches those balls would have been on the field with a likely repeat of F2. Great assessment and adjustment.

Re: Einstein 2014
 

I have to agree with Jared, from my perspective down on the field, I don't think we interfered with the poofs auto in F2 aside from forcing them to use the riskier low goal auto.

In all three of the finals match, our goalie strategy was to let the poofs make the first move, as we weren't sure if they would go to the non-hot goal (hot for the second half of auto), or our claw side goal, as that side was more difficult for us to defend. Unfortunately for us, that ended up being the same side in all three matches.

For the mind game in F3, as Mike said, we anticipated the attempted block by 2848. Our strategy that match was to drive directly in front of them, and then let the poofs make the first move. The idea here was if we committed to one side or the other, 2848 would have cut us off from half of the field, so we decided to drive in front of them, so we still had the ability to go both directions after the poofs started to drive toward one of the low goals.