Thread: 2014 Minne-Mini
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Unread 23-11-2014, 18:35
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Re: 2014 Minne-Mini

Quote:
Originally Posted by DareDad View Post
Not so much the referees as the FTAs and scorekeepers. There's no way in the 2014 FMS to allow for more than 3 autonomous balls at the start of the match. If there were 4 balls on the field at the start, then cycle 1 would start after the 3rd auton ball had been cleared, lighting the pedestal which would put 2 balls on the field for the rest of tele-op.

If they'd said, well we'll just make do, then that would have put a huge burden on field reset because they're the ones who would have to get the call right about keeping a team from pulling a ball off a lit pedestal based on there being more than 4 balls at the start. You can pretty much guarantee that across 42 qualifying matches and up to 9 elimination matches there would have been quite a few more "field fault" replays than the 2 we had.
I appreciate the difficulties involved with having 4 balls in auto mode. At IRI, I believe the real-time scoring did not even reflect the auto scores correctly because the refs could only input 3 balls into the system in auto. The auto scores then had to be manually entered after the match to reflect the scores from the fourth ball. Altogether then, it makes sense to me that no one would want to deal with the potential issues brought on by having 4 autonomous balls. It isn't worth it to me, them, or almost anyone at the event to use these rules if it will cause appreciably more field faults (and we are a team with a reasonably consistent two ball auto).

I am more disappointed with the referees because they did not even attempt to use the IRI assist rules. These rules could easily have been implemented even with the standard FMS if the refs would just enter possessions diagonally across their possession grid instead of using the zone the robot was in. This should in fact be even less work for the referees since they wouldn't have to watch to see which zone each robot was in. This rule change would:
Make the game more fun for drivers (in my opinion)
Make the game more intuitive to the audience
Make the game less error-prone since the referees would be (assumedly) less likely to miss zone-possessions (They missed at least 1 of our zone-possessions yesterday)

This rule change absolutely could have been implemented if the referees would have changed their system just a little bit, but they were unwilling to do so.
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