2011 Lesson Learned: The Negative

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by slijin

Field issues. I observed at least 2 major FMS problems during StL. Following opening ceremonies Friday, I stopped in front of the Curie field to watch the first match of the day. 5 seconds into teleop, the buzzer blares and the timer goes to 0, ending the match.

During our first elimination match, the field timer apparently jumped from 16 to 6 seconds or something of the sort, resulting in the refs nullifying that match result.

Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed by the persistence of such an issue into the Championships.

On a side note, I saw at least 2 instances of towers being triggered by bots crashing into them, leaving VERY close minibot races up to human judgment, which imho, cannot be empirically accurate nor reliable in a race between 1-2s minibots. Putting light compression springs on the suspension bolts would have been a very simple fix to that issue, even if it was a slight modification to field design.

Those were not field issues. The field crew has a method of testing the fields that involves running a 'fast' auton that is only 5 seconds. They accidentally left that setup in and tried to run matches (several times). Oops!