[Donut]

A thread last night made mention of how driving through tunnels will not be a trivial task since it will be difficult to see the robot. Later I thought of an even more important concern; just how difficult is it to see this year's game pieces behind the bumps and platforms?

From a few rough calculations it seems there is a 3 foot zone behind the farthest bump and a 1 foot zone behind the closer bump where balls are basically not visible. A test with a cardboard box and tape measures seemed to confirm this, though driver height had a significant factor in this (between me at 5'6" and my Dad at 5'10"). More concerning though is estimates made for the platform, which I found had a 4.5 foot dead zone behind the closer platform and a 9 foot dead zone behind the farther one (half the opponent's zone!).

Couple this with the area directly in front of the player's station where balls will be difficult to see because of the wall up front, and camera and/or autonomous ball finding capabilities suddenly seem much more important than I had first anticipated.

I hope I'm overestimating the impact this will have because if game pieces are actually that hard to find then scoring a ball will be much harder than I anticipated. For any team that has built a mock up field or teams at a kickoff with a full field, how hard was it to actually see balls in the middle and opposing zones?