2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by IndySam

I can absolutely guarantee you that this was not the case. If it appeared it was it was truly just a random thing. I am basically appalled that you would believe that the head ref or reset people would conspire against you.

Indy, I can only tell you what I observed from my time in the stands. We noted times when the field was reset where the balls were placed fairly near the center. We also noticed that on a number of occasions when robots set up to clearly go to the bridge, balls were placed at the extreme edges. Once, our robot was lined up to get a ball, and they went out and moved the ball. A second time, they placed the balls and when the drive team went to line the robot up, they were told they could not because the balls had to be placed after the teams left the field.

In the end I suspect you are right and that there was no active bias against teams that could pick from the bridge. However, the arbitrary rule creation (can't line up your robot, balls have to be placed after teams leave the field, and balls will be randomly placed anywhere on the bridge) was extremely frustrating when the top 5+ robots on the field were seperated by 1 point.

It's all old news anyway. It was a great competition. This is just something that needs to be highlighted so that hopefully FIRST and their head refs can learn from it in the future.