Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

In Arizona they had to restart a good number of matches because the green lights wouldn't come on or they both came on. A couple times, one alliance's autonomous wouldn't come on. The last match of the regional was restarted twice. The real time scoring seems to work fairly well but sometimes they added in the 10 pt bonus and sometimes they didn't.

I didn't see it but I heard that in semifinals 330's alliance was put on the field because they were told they won but then pulled off the field because they were told that there was an error in the system and they actually lost.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

I must be missing something in the body of your post that supports the introduction, other than maybe that it was worse someplace else.

Machines and electronics must get it right every time, otherwise they're next to useless. They still had to have six people counting shots. To me, that says it all - they didn't trust it.

An auto industry expert in machine vision pointed out to me that the 60Hz florescent light source is conspiring with the video frame rate to produce destructive interference, which is why the pros use lasers. That makes sense to me. Test his theory for yourself. Drop a pair of small objects into a very calm body of water (a swimming pool a daybreak). Observe the waves as they radiate from each end. Then notice the patterns caused as they interfere in the center. They will appear to spawn more waves, the way those counters are spawning shots.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

Hey, all those waits weren't so bad for us...our alliance got along great, we were actually having fun. I say it wasn't so bad now, when I'm not nearly dehydrated and dead on my feet, not to mention more nervous than I've ever been in my life about the next match and whether our alliance's many mechanical problems can be sorted out or not. But hey, it created a lot of memories.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

Buckeye ran fairly well overall. There was the massive failure at the beginning of Friday that Ricky mentioned earlier, but other than that, the problems seemed fairly minor and quickly corrected. I'm extremely glad for the delay built in after autonomous ends for balls to be cleared from the upper goals - sometimes the delay was nearly 30 seconds!

I only saw one match where a ball got stuck in the low goal. It was an interesting match for me because I was coaching 1675 (my primary team) against 1714 (my secondary team and our mentor team). I looked up at the score about midmatch and it read 237-10 or something like that...so I knew that was wrong. In the end, I heard we had over 1000 points. It was ruled 53-3 at first, but that was wrong as well. In the end it was declared 28-28, but I've heard that that was wrong as well, but I haven't seen any video (and it doesn't matter).

Another issue that I expect to be common to ALL fields is the delay between the start of period 2 and the starting sound for period 2. I have my drivers step up as soon as the automode ends where as most drivers wait for the sound, which typically results in no moving robots until the clock reads 35 seconds.

There was one additional issue that I have NO idea what could be the cause of it. If there is no chance it could be field issue, let me know and I'll ask the question in the appropriate location. Our autonomous program runs perfectly on the practice field, but on the competition field, the robot moves 1 foot instead of 16' before shooting. Its almost as if the program is started BEFORE the robots are enabled and it just catches the tail end of the movement, when it adjusts for the goal. Any thoughts?

Kev

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

Couple things i noticed. That the grace period was great for the autonomous to let the balls in. Didn't disrupt the game much and it allowed for latter balls to be scored. One thing i did find disapointing was the way the balls weren't replaced. I remember one ball i picked up as human player and my middle finger went about 3/4s of the way into the ball by way of a hole.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

I remember in our 2nd match in the finals of Great Lakes, they announced that we had in fact had not won the autonomous period, which changes things greatly. Although it would have made no difference in our loss, the outcome of autonomous mode and the 10pt bonus greatly changes the strategy. If one team were led to believe they won autonomous and played a shutout game afterwards, only to be told otherwise after the match, they'd be pretty miffed to say the least.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

Autoscoring Problems occurred throughout the Elims. In the first start of SF2-4, 398 autonomously slammed into the alliance wall and knocked 1629's OI panel to the floor, breaking their joystick. The Field was never the same after this hit. False stars and communication problems were rampant. Autoscoring went from bad to nearly worthless. The Field was good in qualifying rounds but just couldn't last. The constant hits the alliance walls take from auto bots, ball dumpers, ramp bots, defense, and poof ball shots seems to knock things out of whack.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

Autoscoring worked as well as our autonomous mode!

Actually some of the issues may have been the humans-
We were at the UTC Regional-
Our last match in the elims- Team 195 Scored 10 in Automode and accrued the 10 pt bonus. Thats 20 in my book. Then in the video I have I see 2-3 balls rolling in the corner goal. I thought we got 1 out of 2 in the 3pts goal while getting pushed back. (But thats not completely confirmed- though the announcer eluded to it as well.) Then 195 was trapped in the corner with a full load and was getting pushed around, but they mannaged to turn arround and face the corner goal. This allowed them to dump 3-4 that I could see (before the camera moves) but they had a full load and they were all poised to exit the robot- According to the Auto score, they went in.

At the end of the round the Auto scoring had us up 29-24 (All of which was easily accounted for in the video I have), The opponents had two teams on the Ramp and one playing defence- so they did not have any last second scoring, Team 236 was on the ramp for our alliance. That puts it at an even score. (34-34)

The final results- 35-26 - We Lose. No Penalties.

I reviewed the video I have - The above is what I can confirm from what I see on the DVD. And I see no possible way this score was possible ( I'm not disputing their score- If they had 35 and all the balls were counted correctly- they should have beat us by 1pt- I cant confirm, their score) I'm basically saying that There is no possible way at all that our score could be correct.

In our First Sat Morning Match- Team 228 GUS- felt the score we recieved was also impossible. I dont remember the scenario- I need to look at the video. I also felt that we werent getting the final scores that seemed were being accumilated (Even if we still don't win our matches- I'm concerned with how this effects everyone involved?)

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

I was at the NJ Regional doing Field Repair & Reset

Scoring issues were rampant;
The end goals were close to being reliable but there was 4 volunteers station at each of the end goals to do manual scoring
During some of the matches the team numbers & ranks would not show up when the final score was displayed
During the finals matches the score would be 35 to 55 but after no penalties were deducted the score would be 35 to 0, which would confuse the MC's and referees constantly

As for the field;
The field remained in good condition the carpet suffered maybe 2 - 4 small tears in it.
The poof balls were also in pretty good condition: out of all the robots running over them & shooters shooting them the NJ regional only had to replace a box and a half full (however many comes in a box) which isn't bad considering 63 robots were using them constantly throughout the 3 days.
As for the poof balls getting caught up in the center goal there were not many problems with it maybe once or twice 2 balls got caught up on one another and didn't drop right away but the field manager stationed one volunteer on each end to release balls.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

The problem of balls not exiting the center goal was very common. It mostly happened when large volleys of balls went into the goal (happened often). Either that or the balls would get stuck in the bottom because the angel they were thrown in at was so low that they didn’t even hit the chains and would become wedged in the netting (I don't know how but it happened). But the scores were kept manually fro most of the comp and the real time scores weren’t even posted.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

There didn't seem to be too many problems in St.Louis. A couple of times the scoring couldn't be shown on the screen. The biggest issue we had was the automonous not being counted correctly. For example, the extra 10 points wouldn't be awarded or not all the balls would score. Otherwise it wasn't too bad.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

This is a very very hard year for the scoring of matches, as many sensors are needed, compared to last year only having human counters. I congratulate FIRST on handling it as well as they did, considering it was soo much different from last year.

Although, their was MANY problems @ GLR, the main one was the hatch leaderboard being down for more then half the time, one match having to reset like 5 times due to various errors, and scores being posted backwards for the first 11! matches. So we were freaking out, our score was only 9, we scored at least 15, (score was posted 37 : 9 ), turned out the 37 was ours! They later fixed it,

suggestion: it would have been nice to have a field crew member near the scoring table, to tell any team members what happened, as i went there myself right after the match, and was not able to get any information other then (the official score for match XX was...) <but it was backwards...

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

Rampant is a good word. The scoring was going bad immediately before that as well; our alliance thought, based on the autoscoring on the screen, we had lost SF 2-3, when it came to a tie by the hand count. (Best feeling ever, by the way: thinking you're done then finding out you're still in it. :) )

That was a once-in-a-lifetime hit, that autonomous ram(or at least I hope it is). Our alliance partner, 1370, was running a blocking autonomous; they hit 398 just right to spin them so they'd make it up the ramp right in front of us, slamming into our wall. No one's fault, really, but we nearly freaked out when we realized the joystick broke. It was a horrible sight: our bot was doing donuts on the field and the match was still going. Thankfully, we had a spare, and the refs graciously let us tether our bot on the field to calibrate it.

Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?
 

I agree there.. we had one of the metal covers from the alliance lights fall onto our controls.. The wall seems really weak this year.

NOT Week 2 but Week 3: So how's that Field Working?
 

EDIT- OOPS, move to "Week 3: So how's that Field Working?" once we have one.


MWR was an improvement over GLR. The real time scoring appeared to work well in testing, but we still didn't trust it enough to use it as the official score. We had a group of Navy volunteers (Great Lakes trainees) and their instructors do the counting. I'll guaran-darn-tee you they got it right. GO NAVY!!!
The major malfunction with scoring was that, even if the sensor count hardware and software had it right, the Hatch scoring software displayed it wrong.

We had a couple of restarts because the system failed to reset after autonomous. Also, the clock would start at 38 instead of 40 when blue won autonomous, so winning autonomous was worth ten points plus two seconds. Note: that observation was from the RED perspective (that is, BLUE won auto, RED lost two seconds) The other perspective may have shown the same thing - don't know - wasn't stationed down there.

One curious gremlin was that teams lost radio communications a few times. It acted like someone had a radio out there on the same frequency - it always happened against RED #2. Twice at the end of the matches in quals. Again in the semis for a long time when 1213 went silent. A check in the pit showed nothing wrong with 1213's radio. In every case the IFI software showed full COM, but the robot went away, or got flaky on the scoring system side. There was no doubt in my mind that the drivers lost control of the robot - either that. or they deserve an Academy Award. Not one of the matches was re-played.

The low goals were modified with a U-channel stiffener across the top so that it would not flex inward on impact. It helped prevent incursion, along with the fact that we gave them a great big APPROXIMATELY three inches - only two DQs called for low goal incursion, both in the quals.