Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyle Love
I have a couple thoughts.
A huge congrats to 111, 67 and 971, you guys performed great all competition long and were truly the best alliance there.
Second, maybe not so cheerful comment.
For teams who competed on Galileo, did you notice that the blue alliance station seemed to lose communication throughout the weekend? At first I thought "oh we must have something loose", but after hearing of it happening to team after team, I raised an eyebrow. Did any of you also notice this?
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First let me echo the congrats, not only to our division champions, shortly thereafter world champions, but to all the teams that competed on Galileo. It was an honor to work this field for the week.
Your scorekeeper team kept records of the match turns as well as records of which robots had issues. We did not see a pattern that followed one alliance station or either alliance. We did see that certain teams consistently had trouble with their robots, regardless of which alliance or station position they were assigned. This normally indicates the problem is on the robot side instead of the field side. I was watching the status displays most of the time and often knew there was a problem before the team did. In such instances we alerted the FTA and FTAA to try to see if they could identify and correct the problem. Most often the radio links would drop at the same time as a robot suffered a collision. I did notice that the robots having the most trouble syncing with the field tended to have the radio buried inside the robot. Metal can interfere with radio reception, as can large motors and their magnetic fields. We also had chat open to the NI booth and would alert them to check out robots we thought might need an experienced eye to find a subtle or hidden issue.
In 101 qualification matches we aborted two matches during play, one because an E-stop was hit when it should not have been. One other was replayed when multiple teams showed simultaneous communication issues during the match, leading us to believe that there could have been a field fault. There were many times when I'd see robots stop moving, yet status indicators would show no problems. Sometimes we could see parts of the robot moving (like an intake roller) but no drive capability. Draw your own conclusion as to where the problem resides. Perhaps that seems to some as if there were massive field problems, but having weathered many seasons at FIRST, it seemed everything ran pretty smoothly to me. Overall, we cycled qualification matches every 6 minutes and 16 seconds.
If someone has some evidence of a problem I missed, I'd sure like to pass it back up the chain to improve future competitions.