[colt527]

I guess a description of the new tower triggering mechanism would be useful for some here who did not get to see it at a week 2 regional. There are NO force sensors up there. There are simply 3 metal contact points that act as simple switches (note, this is as of week 2. week 1 had 3 limit switches). As long as 1 of those contact points is hit for enough time for FMS to read the signal it will trigger. The setup itself is dead simple.

One problem is that any changes made to the tower need to be so cheap, simple, and easy to assemble that FIRST can ship it to all the regionals and they can put put together by the field staff there. I think FIRST did a reasonable job with those constraints in mind. I would love for the bolts to not be there at all because I still think thats the cause of most robots that reach the top and don't trigger. Maybe the bolts could be reversed so that they are anchored to the bottom plate? (this would increase the effective mass of the bottom plate, so more force would be required to push it up)

Regardless, these are the current constraints of the system and I think with a few small mini bot modifications you will be able to trigger that setup every time. And if it still doesn't, then you have a better case for there being a major flaw in the triggering mechanism.

I believe that FIRST and the teams need to work on getting the automated triggering to work with very very high reliability. I believe the reason for that becomes clear if you examine the following case. For this case, lets make 2 assumptions. First, that teams and FIRST do not continue to refine the triggering. Second, that we allow the refs to manually override the triggering results.

With those assumptions, lets say we are in the final match of Archimedes deciding who will go to Einstein. All 4 minibots go up and all hit the trigger with imperceptible differences in arrival time. However, 1 minibot does not trigger. Now what do you do? A precedent was set in previous matches that the refs can make a judgement call based on what it looked like. Even if in that case the minibot was not as close of a call, but you know that will not stop the team from flooding the field with shaky video footage and their first hand accounts to try and show when it hit. I think these 2 assumptions lead to a messy future.

Now, if teams and FIRST work to refine the automated triggering mechanism then we will probably never even have this problem to deal with. And even if there are a very very small number of cases where it seems like it should have legitimately triggered but did not, then at least there is a consistent precedent of not counting it unless the robot triggers the sensors and the playing field will still remain even for all teams.