Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

You are right, but you can also blame me... that is my job as head ref and it's ok. This is why I get the "big bucks" as head ref. :)

First of all, I was overly impressed by all teams out in Portland. Please read these words..

As for these three situations (out-of-bounds-bonehead-disable, timeout & not allowing substitution), I will try to offer an explaination:

1. Out of bounds situation in the finals with 1031.

1031 was going for the 10 point ball in automode. They glanced into the side wall. There was a 3/16" steel cable located in the middle of the side wall. This cable, in my opinion came loose for little reason during their contact with the wall and did not do anything to keep them in bounds. I found that to be field failure. It was stupid of me to disable the wrong robot, I agree. However, I felt that if the cable would've been fastened tightly, the robot would not have gone out of bounds. It was my call. I messed up, the field messed up, and we decided to simply re-run the match.

2. Time-outs

Keep in mind that FIRST has not had time-outs for a couple of years. What does a 6 minute time-out mean? To me, it means that at the end of 6 minutes, we run the match. I had the job of enforcing this rule.

3. Declaring who is playing in the elimination matches

This issue is tougher than the above two. Team 1433 was told that they needed to declare which two teams are going to play in the final match. They tried to stall for time (heck, I could not blame them for that!) and they got well over the 4 minutes to decide who to put in for the final match. Once they decided to put in 753, they took a timeout to let 753 get things working. The way I conducted my actions and decisions during this sequence was simply from my experience as a FIRST field coach. I've been in about 20 different FIRST elimination tournaments and I've coached regional and national winners along with coaching in over 200 FIRST matches. I simply tried to do what has been done in the past and what will be done in Atlanta at the Championships. The young man who made the call for 1433 made the best decision he could at the time. It was tough for him to do, and he was told that he could not change the pairing once the decision was made.

Andy B.

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

I just wanted to thank Andy B. for what I deemed to be an incredible job in a difficult situation, especially given the continuing technical and playing field problems we saw at Portland. Some of the calls he had to make were as tough as they come, but he came through cooley and professionally while continuing to be a great encouragement to the individual teams. Thanks for your wonderful example, and your years of helping improve the competitions and their objectives ! :cool:

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

I would also like to thank Andy for doing a great job as a referee. When you have to make calls that determine matches in the elimination rounds, there is a lot of pressure, and someone is going to end up unhappy. Definitely one incredible regional. Thanks Andy!

Also, thanks to our great alliance partners 1433 and 1294! There were so many matches that were decided by all the balls you were able to put in (most notably, the second of the semi-finals, when we were facing elimination).

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

I am the captain of team 1433 from Newberg, Oregon. I was also the "young man" who made the decision to play 753 in the final match. I feel that Andy Baker made the right call by not letting us switch who was to play in the final match. I do not agree with allowing 1031 to compete the match after they should have been DQ-ed. Not much i can say now to change the end result but i was overall very pleased with a second place finish. I would like to extend my thanks to both teams 753 and 1294, for being the best alliance partners one could ask for. We can not forget that we upset the 3rd and 2nd ranked alliances just to get to the finals. Great job guys!

I have already contacted a representative for team 753 and extended my thanks, i would love to hear back from someone on team 1294, i could not find any contact info on the net for your team... samporter04@hotmail.com

Team 1318 at PNW Regionals
 

I'm a mentor for Team 1318, a rookie team from Issaquah, WA (suburb of Seattle). We had a great time at the competition, heading an alliance in the finals.

First lesson: bring stuff to trade. Most teams bring team buttons to exchange with other teams. Collect the whole set. Fortunately, one of our parents was able to track down a button-making machine and saved us from a regional faux pas.

Thursday we worked all day fixing glitches. We made many incremental improvements to the robot, but didn't get anything totally working: autonomous failed, we couldn't get up on the lower platform and never even got to try hooking the bar.

The steps up the platform were not built to spec; the first step was 1 3/4" to 1 7/8" tall, not the 1.5" they made such a big fuss about at the kick-off (everything is built to lumber dimensions so the play field is easy to accurately simulate). In addition, the run for the first two steps was an 1/8" short. Both of these errors made the steps steeper than specified, and we lacked the clearance to make it up.

I knew they couldn't fix it for our competition but pointed it out to the regional and FIRST officials. I got a very condescending response from the regional chairperson who mocked me for complaining, even though I said I wasn't asking them to change it for our regional, but to consider fixing it for the next one. The FIRST officials told me the specs are "plus or minus an inch." So I take this to mean the steps could be anywhere from 1/2" to 2.5" tall!

The annoying responses were more of a problem than the flaw in the field. We hacked-sawed the bottom of our frame to get more clearance.

Lesson: don't trust the specs and design your robot well within the specs so that playfield errors won't prevent successful operation.

After so many problems on Thursday, Friday was not looking to be fun. But, the hard work paid off, our robot was functional the whole day. We worked hard again all day Friday improving the robot and software, managing to go 5 and 2. We got autonomous and hooking working, had good success with shooting 5-pointers and herded balls well enough to get some wins with our alliance partners.

Saturday, we improved to 6 wins, 2 losses and 1 tie, which got us fifth place out of 36 teams. We headed the fifth seed alliance and chose teams 1039 and 1430. We were eliminated in the first round, with some pretty exciting drama. I'll describe that experience and the lessons learned in another post.

It was great to see gracious professionalism in action. I burned a CD with all of the FIRST docs and the latest software versions just before we left and got to share it with several other teams. We gave and received lots of advice and random parts. All in all, a great experience. We've already met once and started planning for next year.

Team 1318 at PNW Regionals, Part 2
 

We headed the fifth-seed alliance at the regionals and picked 1039 and 1430 as our partners. We picked them because they were good competitors and had robots that worked well at capping and uncapping goals, which complimented our autonomous and hanging abilities.

In the first match, we got off to a good start; autonomous worked and we were on our way up to hook when the match was stopped. The opposing alliance had not gotten any power and there was smoke on the field.

As it turns out, at least part of the smoke was our robot. This had happened before and we thought we had solved the problem. We had three switches on the robot to pick options in autonomous mode. Originally, they were all mounted on together on cardboard, which kept them tucked out of the way and immobile, but easy to find when needed. During an earlier match, the mounting got destroyed, so the switches were loose. Then, one of them shorted causing smoke on the field. We found the melted wires on the switch and diagnosed the problem as nicked insulation and the switch wires shorting together.

In hindsight, that didn't make any sense at all. The two wires were ground and signal and the switch's entire purpose was to short them together! Doing so would not cause melting and smoke, just a wrong reading.

Instead, what we now realize must have happened is that the switch wiggled down to the electronics board and the ground terminal on the switch managed to find an +12V terminal to short against. This will cause melting, and smoke, and I'm told even vaporized a pin on the RC. I guess the ground wire on the RC doesn't have a fuse. It's actually kind of amazing it didn't fry the RC.

The short in the finals match must have happened after we'd started autonomous (otherwise it would have chosen a different autonomous mode), so we would have been fine if the match hadn't been stopped (once the pin was melted off the RC, the short could not happen again).

We weren't allowed to repair the problem, only removed the wire that caused the short. So, in the rematch, our robot picked the wrong autonomous mode, which failed for several reasons, including the line sensor board was no longer attached to the robot. In the process of identifying the problem before the rematch, one of the encoders got unplugged. So, at drive time, the robot was pretty much undrivable because the software was working hard to get the wheels to run at the requested relative rates, but couldn't because one encoder was not sending any signals. When the encoders get unbalanced, we speed up the lagging wheel and slow down the leading wheel in proportion to how far out of whack they are. Eventually, this shut down the other wheel entirely, so our robot was only good for driving in circles.

To my continuing amazement, our driver figured out what was going on. He also knew the software very well and realized that the software reset the encoder difference whenever the joystick was in the neutral position, so he drove until the one wheel stopped responding, then centered the joystick and repeated. He managed to get our robot, which is challenging to drive under the best of circumstances, up the stairs even with this huge handicap, but not in time to hook. We lost the match.

Between matches, we removed the remaining switch, reattached the encoder, fixed a limit switch on our arm that had also come unplugged, and downloaded new code to always pick the correct autonomous mode and assume we're running on the right side of the field. Unfortunately, we weren't quick enough and had to send our two partner teams to the second match, although they didn't have very complementary capabilities. They put up a good fight, and suffered a no start problem (not sure of the cause, their robot or the playfield), and got a re-match, but ultimately lost. We were ready to go by the re-match, but of course couldn't switch teams.

Lesson One: insulate positive terminals, put shrink-tube insulation around all switch and sensor terminals, and put all components on solid mounts.

Lesson Two: Think about the impact on safety of any field repairs. We should have realized the loose switches were unsafe after they lost of the card and could more around more freely.

Lesson Three: don't depend on the electrical inspection to ensure that your robot is safe from (now) obvious problems. We got high praise from the inspector, so we thought we were in good shape when we should have been going over all of the electronics and insulating every exposed terminal or lug.

Lesson Four: If you're fortunate enough to head an alliance, don't assume your robot will be in every match when picking partners. I don't know that we would have picked differently, our partners did an awesome job in the second match, but it's something to think about.

Even if you're a rookie team and have a poor showing during practice rounds on Thursday, prepare for being an alliance leader. At worst, your team will learn a lot about the other robots, but won't get to use it until you start designing next year's robot. We did this preparation and research in the hopes of being the 2nd team on an alliance and getting input into choosing the 3rd team.

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

I would like to thank all of the sponsors who contributed to the PNW regional. You provided the funding necessary to finance a truely exceptional activity.

A sincere thank you also goes to all of the volunteers. This was the first year for Portland and it all ran very smothly. Your hard work was invaluable.

The teams were awesome. The competition was intense and the energy was very high. Your bots were truely exceptional machines. It is amazing that they were built in only 6 weeks.

Congratulations on a exciting 2004 event. I look forward to seeing you all next year at the 2005 PNW Regional.


I am interested in feedback from the teams who were at the PNW Regional. What did yo like? What do you hope could be improved next year? Please send your input via email so we don't clog up this forum.

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

FWIW, for scouting purposes, I typed up my handwritten match notes for the elimination rounds. These don't have the score breakdown, but they are my observations of what actions were taken by which team when. Hope they're of some use. -Piece, Pteryxx

http://www.uiproductions.com/pteryxx...04Scouting.txt

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

Team 492 has several pictures of the PNW Regional on our website: http://www.titanrobotics.net/index2....iew.cfm&cat=12 and we've also made a promotional video from the PNW footage: http://www.titanrobotics.net/index2....romotional.cfm

Be sure to check them out, as there might be some pictures of your team in there...

Congrats to everyone for a great competition!

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

3rd try:


Webcasts archive of the PNW finals are at http://robotics.nasa.gov.


Did I understand that it took 4 matches to decide the finals. 1 tie, 1 red win, 1 blue win, and then a 4th match? Isn't it suppossed to be best 2 out of 3?
The best two out of 3 would mean either highest QP at the end of 3 matches.

I need to re read the rules!!!


What happens if there were two ties? No schedule will last if it takes an hour to run a set of elimination matches.

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

Is there any way I can download the NASA webcast clips?

(There is still one missing clip:

Specifically, it is QF 2.2 - 948 + 1258 vs. 1039's alliance. The QF 2.2 that is on there is not the right match. FIRST made us redo the match because of something I can't remember.)

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

no, the announcer said that it's not a best 2 out of 3 but a team MUST win 2 games to win, so they would replay and replay until one team has 2 wins.

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

I have organized this text into a webpage: http://nrg.chaosnet.org/uploads/pnwrmatches

In my never-ending quest to generalize, I will be writing a database front-end to facilitate the viewing and updating of descriptions of matches from any regional.

[Pteryxx, if you have any problem with me putting your content, post here and I will remove it ASAP.]

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

about 1031 DQing.
IT would not have been a real restart of the match if they had left 1031 DQed would it? Should to ref just have said. "oh lets just turn him of at the begining of the next round"? No, they would have never even gone out if the field had been working correctly either.

Re: Pacific Northwest Regional in Portland, OR
 

Well, actually they fixed the field and in the next restart they went off the field again, but since our robot didn't start it did not matter. So their robot actually went off the field twice.

Michael Forte
mforte@bendcable.com