2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

[Jon Stratis]

My negatives:
1. The bumper issues this year were horrible. Through all the weeks of regionals/districts, about half the teams at each event had bumper issues that needed to be fixed. That number is way to high to blame it all on the teams.
2. There was very little defense played at the regional level this year - for the most part, teams stayed on their half of the court and did their own thing. There were exceptions, but it made the game a little boring.
3. The game was a little more challenging than in past years, which I feel hurt the rookies. In the past, a kitbot could go in and do some good for a team, even if it's just driving to the other side and getting in the oppositions way. Not so with this year, as traversal of the field was non-trivial (despite how easy some teams made it appear!).
4. The Kinect has a great potential "coolness" factor that wasn't realized with this game. You didn't have long enough or accurate enough control to make it really useful during autonomous, and only letting one team on each alliance also limited its usefulness. This was something I really wanted to use this year, until I figured out we could do everything we wanted with a normal autonomous mode.

Some fixes for the above negatives:
1. FIRST has already stated they're getting a group together to go over the bumper rules for next year, and that group includes mentors and inspectors, the two groups of people that mater the most for this issue!
2. I'm not sure there's anything FIRST can do about this, other than to make sure we have a more balanced game next year!
3. I really feel that there needs to be something simple a team can do to materially benefit their alliance. I've been here for 6 years now, and tell tell you exactly what kitbots could do in every game up until now: Rack 'n Roll, they could play defense with little or no risk of penalties. Overdrive, they could do laps to score points. Lunacy, a good driver could avoid getting scored on. Breakaway, they could play defense fairly well just by getting in front of the goal. Logomotion, they could play defense really well just by pushing tubes to the sides and getting in the way. The game next year needs to include something for a simple kitbot to do!
4. The game needs to involve some way for the kinect to very clearly be superior. For example, in overdrive the balls were randomly positioned, and the hybrid remotes could, in theory, tell your robot where the ball actually was. The kinect gives us more control, so maybe take this same concept and make it 3 dimensional? What about allowing control of the robot through the kinect during teleop? There could be a portion of the field that isn't viewable from the driver station, but is from the kinect station - the human player can "take over" with the kinect in order to do something for some serious bonus points for their alliance.