[Tom Line]

Frankly, I'm shocked to hear it's this bad. I've been to many district competitions in Michigan, and I think I can count on one hand the number of times a match was started with a robot not communicating.

In fact, the field FTA at West Michigan announced flat out that they would NOT be starting a match with disconnected robots. He was true to his word, and they still managed to finish qualifications early.

I wonder if we can ask FIRST to keep statistics so we can see what type of problem we're talking about.

In many cases, for instance the Beach Bots, the problem was not a field problem. It was a hardware problem that was nearly impossible to diagnose. It's pretty hard to distinguish between the two.